Ben Stein’s career arc, roughly:
Lawyer -> White House speechwriter -> Comedic actor -> Game show host -> wingnut columnist -> creationist tool.
Extrapolating this descent, we get a future career arc that looks something like this:
Creationist tool -> Scientologist -> Infomercial host -> Mime -> hobo.
Of course, that’s just a guess.
Really? You have a whole lot of kids in your school that profess atheism? That would be both new and unlikely…much more likely is that the kids picking on the other kids are at least nominally Christian, as about 80% of the population of this country is at least nominally Christian.
In what form, exactly, does this persecution take place? Does it flow mainly in one direction, or is it the result of mutual hostility from both sides? Are the Christian students harrassed more often than non-Christian students? What faith do the non-Christian students profess, if any?
In reference to the “non-believers harrassing Christians” thing, let me explain where I’m coming from. I went to Catholic school for 13 years (1 year of Jesuit college in addition to the normal elementary/high school). We had more than enough mutual harrassment over things like curfews, parental strictness differences, popularity strata, sexual situations, etc. that we didn’t even come close to having to contract out the harrassment to Protestants, let alone non-Christians. We did quite all right generating the typical school-days atmosphere of fear, apprehension, shame and interpersonal hatred all by our little Catholic selves.
To say it’s persecution because they are Christian is downright silly.
I was one of those “persecuted” youths when I was in high school. And the people who picked on me for it? Christians, at least nominally so. But I suspect they weren’t picking on me BECAUSE I was a fundy, but because I was different, outside the norm. It was your typical high-school in-crowd versus those who are different mentality. The actual content of my beliefs at the time didn’t matter–it was that I was different that mattered.
But you could reduce anything to that. Kids pick on gay kids and black kids and fat kids for exactly the same reason.
Which probably tells us something about the usefulness of making generalizations about persecution in society by examining the behavior of highschool students.
Junior High and High School are Lord of the Flies with less sand and more bells.
While many public schools in Philadelphia are over 90% minority, parents who are looking for a lily-white school for their kids need to look somewhere other than the Catholic schools. In 2003, Archdiocesan schools in the city were about 23% minority. I think the driver for most parents in Philadelphia is to get their kids out of a broken, underfunded system and into the best schools they can afford, which for most lower to middle class families of whatever race means Catholic schools.
Funny names, wrong tennis shoes, I remember the persecution when I wore BLUE EYE SHADOW which had me in tears on the bus. And before anyone says I deserve it for blue eye shadow, it was the 1980s, everyone wore blue eye shadow.
That’s obviously less about faith and more about participating in activities deemed not cool and refusing to participate in those deemed cool than anything else. The same “persecution” is going to happen to a virgin nerd who stays away from drugs and plays Dungeons and Dragons after school instead of sports.
What about the Christians who smoke dope, screw like rabbits, and play varsity football? How often do they get persecuted?
My God, high school students are being teasing and exclusionary?! Surely a Christian Auschwitz is imminent!
And the degree. If name-calling and snobbery count as “persecution”, then “persecution” has become so pussified that it means nothing.
If you don’t think a move from 90% minority to 23% minority (and significantly lower in some schools I would imagine from seeing the school kids) is a driving factor for some of the parents involved, then we will ahve to agree to disagree. I’ll accept things have changed over the years, but my ex-wife went to a Catholic school in Philly and had three African American students in her class.
Of course for many the driver to is quality of school. My response was aimed at the attitude that when a Southern family send their kids to private school, it is because they are racist. I think that attitude exists as much in the north, and Philly is the northern city I lived longest in.
Or even kids attempting to participate in something that’s deemed “cool,” but is also “too cool for them.” Like Dangerosa said, she wasn’t the only girl wearing blue eyeshadow in the '80s. And they weren’t all being teased for it.
Just to MAKE SURE that I don’t have it wrong, are you male or female?
I wore a pair of parachute pants to school—once. Occasionally there’s a fine line between persecution and social euthanasia.
It was the 1980s. Everybody wore blue eye shadow. Except me, I wore plaid pants.
You can only imagine the ribbing I got as President of the Gay Black Overweight Straight Christian Alliance chapter of my school.
Now plaid eyeshadow would have been a sight to behold.
Excerpts from Ben on Darwinism:
Who knew those finches were so frigging racist?
Social Darwinism is “Darwinism perhaps mixed with imperialism” in much the same way that Nazism was German nationalism “perhaps mixed” with antisemitism.
When I first started teaching in 1969, I had a high school principal so enmeshed in Christian fundamentals that any deviation from what he considered “the norm” was seen as an evil influence on the high school students and grounds for not being rehired the next year. Therefore, non-tenured male teachers could not grow their hair down to their collars. Women could not wear boots, jeans, trousers or pantsuits. People were actually fired for these transgressions.
Liberal Christians were targeted by fundamentalist teachers and principals for the entire twenty years that I taught. Atheists didn’t bother us at all. We tended to be on the same side of the issues.
I agree with Sampiro that this may have been true in the early years of integration, but it really isn’t the pattern now and hasn’t been for decades.
Since you are a member of the Science Board, you might also want to notice that people in the South don’t use “good ol’ Dixie” in serious discussions and wouldn’t be anymore likely to use “undesirable elements” as a substitute for the word minorities than any other part of the country which is multi-cultural and sometimes inhabited by bigots. They are a minority too – at least in the South that I am familiar with and have lived in for nearly two-thirds of a century.
You may not have intended any affront with your words at all, but I just expect a less jaundiced viewpoint expressed by someone who speaks for science. I mean you no offense either.
Diogenes, didn’t the movie preview/review that was submitted to IMDB say that the Stein film is satirical? Maybe I misread. (Maybe everyone evolved except Ben Stein.)
See The Extended Trailer.