Grin! My Physical Anthropology prof gave a similar introduction. She said, “Darwin’s theory may be wrong out there in the real world, but inside this classroom, it will be taken as correct. You aren’t required to accept it, but you are required to comprehend it.”
Agreed, that’s not a line to many atheists would use.
It would be like a Christian declaring “Zeus is dead!”
We did try out libertinism in cold beds for a while, but that wasn’t working out for us.
So what does Christian-boy think will happen if he writes the phrase? Skies darkening, walls bursting in blood and flame, locusts descending in hordes? Because that would be kinda cool and now attainable on even a modest effects budget.
Cue the lions! These morons are so disappointed that they don’t get to be martyrs any more that they have to make things up - or decide that two gays holding hands is religious persecution.
The people who wrote this movie aren’t very clear on the concept of what philosophy is all about.
American Christian persecution cinema, as believable a premise as zombie apocalypse flicks.
You can tell because they don’t even try to show what real religious persecution looks like.
Or missionaries. Honestly, of all the predictable :smack: and :rolleyes: stuff in that trailer, what pissed me off the most was Plucky Little Christian’s Dreamboat Friend telling Plucky Little Christian he should accept the professor’s challenge because “it might be the only exposure to god and Jesus they [presumably the other students] will ever have”. There aren’t enough fuck youuuus in the entire internet for this line.
But back to the debate : I’m not seeing anything in the trailer about the (necessarily nihilistic, angry-at-god-because-his-mama-died strawman atheist) professor’s challenge about an automatic fail if Plucky Little Christian doesn’t manage to actually *prove *God. A real philosophy professor would probably be aware that it’s as tricky a proposition as disproving it. If the only outcome where Librul College Guy doesn’t automatically fail Plucky Little Christian is if he manages to prove god exists, then yes, that’s a liiiittle bit unfair.
But back in the real world, that would seem to me to be a perfectly valid assignment : “Who believes in god ? You ? Is your belief in god so crucial to you that you can’t even bring yourself to write “god is dead” on a piece of paper ? OK, well I say there’s no god, here’s my lecture supporting this conclusion, next week you get to try and prove the antithesis”, with pass/fail marks being based not at all on whether the student can convince the professor and save him from the woe of disbelief (who gives a shit ? Furthermore, how would a professor of philosophy be swayed by a sophomore’s overnight essay when he’s studied what the greatest minds in history have spent their entire lives pondering to become professor in the first place ?), but simply whether they can build a cogent, coherent argument supporting their evidently deeply held belief and defend it against criticism/Socratic wrangling.
Philosophy isn’t about converting people, it’s about explaining, to oneself first and foremost, what you think and expounding/exploring how you think you think. Exploring one’s faith and its possible limits or stretching points falls squarely within that spectrum, neh ?
Or it could be the “we play this old game first week, I win because I actually know my shit, and you will all spare me any and all god crap for the rest of the year, deal ?” thing, too 
[QUOTE=Ibn Warraq]
Agreed, that’s not a line to many atheists would use.
[/QUOTE]
An atheist ? No, maybe not. A philosophy teacher kicking off a lecture on the works of Hegel or Nietzsche ? It *is *a direct quote.
True fact: just as they slipped the piano wire around Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s neck, his last thought was “at least I’m not at some Midwest party college studying in the lounge until my roomate takes the sock off the doorknob.”
Still not about professing a belief, but about constructing an argument.
I would even defend failing Plucky under certain circumstances, though not this one.
It’s an assignment, which can cause the student to fail the class (but not help him in any way), given to one student student, on the basis of his religion. That’s imposing a subtantial cost, as a penalty for not professing a belief. How can that be anything but religious discrimination?
As a Christian and film lover, let me just say that this is the stupidest fucking premise for a religious movie I have ever seen - and religious movies have already set the bar pretty low.
My Biology 101 teacher went the other way. For the section on Darwin, he skipped anything to do with evolution and showed slides of Wedgwood china. Apparently Darwin’s wife belonged to the family that manufactured the stuff. This was a very large state university, by the way, not Liberty University.
I have a feeling this is a new Kirk Cameron movie. He’s a crackpot. And I’m Christian myself.
There’s also a Facebook meme circulating that goes like this:
Student: I believe in God.
Public school teacher: Have you ever seen Him?
Student: No.
PST: Therefore, He does not exist.
Whenever I see this, I remind the poster that if this really happened, that teacher would be heavily censured, and most likely fired on the spot.
We were told, “We do not demand that you believe it, only that you learn it.”
Per your post that I was replying to, no class subject was specified:
It was in the first sentence of your own post, so I cannot understand why you might have missed it.
My wife is tenured faculty at UCLA. I asked her how this sort of scenario would probably go down.
The student would file a grievance with the university. The university would then have a hearing where the professor would be expected to justify his assignment on pedagogical grounds. If the professor can make a good case that the assignment is actually necessary, then the student is out of luck. However, for something as ridiculous as the assignment in the film, the administration would almost certainly order the professor to change how he teaches the class. If the professor refuses, they can’t fire him, but they can reassign him so he’s no longer teaching that particular class.
There was a recent case at the University of Colorado Boulder where a sociology professor got in trouble over a lecture on prostitution. She’d given the lecture many times (which involved students and teaching assistants role-playing interactions between sex workers and clients) but this year students complained about it. A university investigation is underway – maybe her methods are pedagogically valid and fall under academic freedom, maybe not. In any case, she’s not teaching the course until the issue is resolved.
While at a community college, this woman had tenure. She was fired for forcing students to sign a “Vote for Obama” pledge after a vote by the college’s board of trustees.
Beat me to it. That or Chucky Talks to God goes big-budget.
The evangelicals seem to love to set up these narrow theoreticals (when they don’t claim them to be true) so they can self-flagellate over how terrible their lot is.
The first day of one of my philosophy lectures the professor started by introducing herself, "My name is <prof’s name>, radical lesbian feminist.
By the second lecture about 2/3 of the male students had dropped the class. Too bad for them. It was a great course.
Sounds very much to me like what happens to Jews at the Air Force Academy.