I’ve seen Christians say stuff like “if you, Mr. Atheist, would just say you love god or Jesus you eventually really will.” Letting the old cognitive dissonance work, I suppose. I’ve never seen an atheist do this, but maybe they were projecting their tactics on this fictional professor.
Could you go into more detail about “cognitive dissonance,” please? 
Thank you for finally bringing this up. This is apparently a movie based on an urban legend. We know the intent of the professor through the urban legend. He is specifically a caricature of how certain types of Christians think a Christian will ask. There’s a whole set of urban legends based on there being some proof or another of God’s existence.
Another one has the professor say “God is nowhere” and the student writes “God is now here.” They are little stories that pastors put in their sermons to make points, that get exaggerated into supposed “real” stories.
Oops, forgot a part: the idea is that there’s only one True Christian[sup]TM[/sup] in the class. This True Christian[sup]TM[/sup] doesn’t believe God is dead, so, due to his beliefs, can’t write that on the paper without willfully lying. He successfully fights the temptation to fall into the sin of lying.
The whole confrontation with the professor is always a setup for the True Christian[sup]TM[/sup] to proselytize the rest of the class. That doesn’t work if the other students are Christians.
“Jesus? Who’s that?”
I can’t read past a statement like that. This is just goofy now. There is only one possible response.
On, yes, of course, you’re right.
You should have read the rest of the post.
But if all you really want to pay attention to is the quibble about rolling eyes, then here you go. Rolling eyes after stating someone else’s position communicates the proposition “That position is obviously foolish,” in a way such that the obvious foolishness of the proposition is supposed to be a reason for which the proposition should be rejected. As I said above, it’s not a good argument, but your claim that it’s not an argument is incorrect.
Again, as I said above, this is a minor point and you shouldn’t spend any more time on it now that you’ve been set straight on the technicality. Much more important is the meat of my post, quoted below:
But they weren’t threatened with an “F” in the class, were they? There’s a world of difference. That being said, it’s beyond stupid for any teacher to do something like that, because religion’s a really huge deal for most folks. Imagine the stink if he’d used “Yahweh” or “Allah” instead.
(Now, if he’d produced a statue of The Buddha and insisted that the student stab it with a knife…well, I wonder how many would get the joke. ;))
Okay, I’ll bite…
I think it’s a reference to a line spoken by some Zen master or other: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
I didn’t say the movie’s plot was identical to the FAU story- just that the events were similar enough that I suspected the FAU incident inspired the movie.
Apparently, I was wrong.
As I said earlier, I’m pretty sure DeAndre Poole was trying to make a point, but things got out of hand before he got a chance to make it.
As for me… look, I’m a faithful Catholic and a conservative Republican who went to an Ivy League school. Did I ever encounter extremely liberal, even Marxist professors? Of course. Did some of them say things I found ridiculous, or even offensive? Occasionally. But did I ever storm out of a class? No! All of those teachers were decent people who were willing to entertain intelligent counterarguments. NOBODY ever threatened me with an F for my beliefs.
Even at a very liberal school like Columbia, that just doesn’t happen.
If you take on a position - even as a kind of fake - you start seeing things to support it and ignoring things that don’t. I’ve debated positions I started out opposing and liked a lot better after preparing arguments for them.
There is something called the endowment effect, which makes a thing you own more valuable than it was before you owned it - even if that was seconds before. I’m not sure if this also applies to positions. But it is a reasonable for forcible conversions - if they force you to go to church and spout allegiance to a particular god, before long many people feel that allegiance.
Did anyone ever threaten you with an F for not presenting a valid argument in defense of a belief?
I am a left-wing liberal Democrat who attended a prestigious university, and a public one at that, and was actually kind of disappointed by the lack of wingnuttery among the professors. I mean, isn’t it basically a given at this point that universities are breeding grounds for Marxists, feminists, and Marxist feminists?
Certainly I never had a professor try to be as much of an asshole as the guy in the movie, but I can’t remember one trying a high-impact stunt like the FAU professor either.
As to the OP, there’s a difference between being a bombastic iconoclast and a malicious prick. The former are generally accepted to be protected by tenure - the latter aren’t.
You mean “moonbattery,” right? Not “wingnuttery”?
Right. I guess I was thinking of people like this - http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110716152328/harrypotter/images/3/3f/Pdahq1_(1).jpg
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On the first day of phil 101? Doubtful. Most of the kids in the room probably don’t even know what a valid argument is, and validity isn’t something you can teach in a day.
Anyway, I thought you were wanting to discuss just and only exactly the scenario described in the text of the OP. In the OP, the student is not told to “present a valid argument in defense of a belief,” but rather, to “prove the existence of God” (emphasis mine). I will assume you know the difference between proofs and valid arguments.
Nor does he state a belief in the first place. The OP has it as "[The student] tells [the professor] that he will not [write the phrase]. In the trailer, all the student says is “I can’t do what you want, I’m a Christian”, then the professor gives him the assignment to prove God’s existence.
There’s room to debate what Nietzsche meant by “God is dead”, but it almost certainly wasn’t “God was once a living being, but is now deceased.” It seems to have been meant more the way one might say “Rock is dead” or “Communism is dead”. These things were never literally alive, but the speaker is claiming that their moment has passed and they’re not going to be making a comeback. “Religion is dead” may be a clearer way to express this idea, but Nietzsche was often deliberately provocative.
The basic point that I think Nietzsche was making – that religion was of declining importance as a foundation for society and source of personal guidance – doesn’t really have anything to do with whether there is or ever was a divine being. It’s something both an atheist and a devout Christian could believe to be true, they’d just have different opinions about what this meant for society and the individual. I’d guess that makers of this film do in fact believe that religion is of declining importance in modern society, but that they consider this a bad thing and are hoping to fight the trend.
Nah. I was never threatened with an F for anything except failure to do the assignments or to pass the tests.
As I said, I had lots of professors whose views I vehemently disagreed with, and whom I occasionally butted heads with in class. NONE of them was ever a jerk about it (and, I HOPE, neither was I).
One typical professor was a guy who taught my Contemporary Civilization class. Essentially, that’s two semesters of the leading political philosophers of Western history, starting with Plato. Not surprisingly, we had to read Marx and Lenin, as well as atheist philosophers like Lucretius, Hume and Nietzsche.
This professor never tried to tell us what to believe- but he wanted to be sure that we actually UNDERSTOOD everything we read, because you’re not really a well-educated person if you HAVEN"T read Hume, Marx and Nietzsche.
I never got a bad grade for papers I wrote that were critical of any of those thinkers, but the professor made a point of telling all of us, “What I do not EVER want to see in one of your papers is Plato was an idiot or *Nietzsche is a jerk * or Marx is full or crap. Plato was NOT an idiot. Marx was NOT an idiot. Nietzsche was NOT an idiot. Aristotle was NOT an idiot. They are among the most brilliant thinkers who ever lived. If there’s a fallacy or a contradiction in their work so obvious YOU can see it, assume Plato and Nietzsche must have seen it, too, and try to tell me how you think they would have reconciled the contradiction.”
I had absolutely no problem with that.