Posted: Sep 13, 2013 4:11 am
Scot Dutchy wrote:minininja wrote:I always thought it would be more sense to replace it with a Philosophy class. You could learn something about comparative religion in a module on religious belief easy enough. And maybe include a module in History as well, looking at all the different religions and studying the quality of the original sources.
Replacing woo with another load of woo nice one.
Just forget about religion. It is not a subject on its own and should never be treated a such.
(bold mine)
Scot, I share a lot of your feelings about religion — really, I do. But do you really believe what you wrote in the sentences I highlighted? I'd be hard pressed to think of another area of comparable influence in world history, politics, literature, art, etc. I mean, replace "religion" in your last sentences with "economics". See how ludicrous it sounds? Historically, religion is at least as powerful a force.
Now, you could say that religion is interrelated with all the other subjects so it shouldn't have a course of its own. But it's a huge topic on its own. Teaching it - I mean teaching it well - wouldn't be practical if it were shoehorned into the syllabi of other courses. Literature, for example: nobody can even begin to understand Donne, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, Langland, Dante, Joyce, and Beckett, (not to mention a lot of Shakespeare) without a good knowledge of the texts, tenets and history of (at least) Christianity. And no serious literature course can afford time to pause and give the students a thorough remedial course in the necessary knowledge of religion. It really is a separate subject. Same as (for example), math and physics. They're deeply intertwined, but for reasons of practicality at the very least, they're quite rightly separated.