Back on Topic

Long Time No See. This blog originally started as an English Class assignment, which I hope somewhat explains the sporadicness of my previous post. But after watching Julie/Julia and reading other blogs I am renewed to the project. I hope...

My task? To pick out a quote from the quotegarden website and expound upon it. The website has their quotes divided by categories so every post will come from one of their categories.

The Challenge? To make it through all of the Categories in one year. Not possible you say? Well possible says I. I can hope that I learn more about the world around me by doing this. Hopefully you will to.
First post set for tomorrow.

Students Leaving Early Results in Upset Teachers

Last Tuesday, during my Parenting in Diverse Families class several students came in late and then left early. When they left they walked through the middle isles disruppting not only the professor but me and my fellow students as well. Needless to say my professor was a bit perturbed and was unable to understand why students would need to make such a disruption in the middle of her class. I was inclined to side with her on the matter; that is until I started thinking about all of the reasons why a student may need to leave in the middle of a class. Using a very simplistic form of Refutation and Confirmation I was able to come up with an argument for both sides of the issue.

I am finding that encomiums, invectives, confirmations, and refutations are all something that we use every single day, just like the scientific method, we just don’t think of it in the drawn out way that is taught in class.  

Ignorance is shocking. (Blog number four)

Should religion be taught in schools?

Although this was not one of my questions from the previous blog I feel the need to ask this question and give my answer.

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich talks briefly about her visit to a Christian Tent Revival, and as she comments on her experience there, I got the feeling that she was only making assumption about the preachers as well as the congregation, based only on what she had heard from movies, books, or horror stories from colleagues.  “But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist […] can never get a word out of his mouth. I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full-scale attack” (Ehrenreich 68-69).

I would love to say that her abhorrent comment comes only from her ignorance on religious matters and that had she been a Christian her view of the meeting would not have been so satirical, but according to a recent survey done by CNBC, atheist and agnostics seem to know more about the bible and world religions than proclaimed ‘Christians’.  I found the results of this survey to be very disheartening, having been in church my whole life, a Sunday School Brat if you will; therefore I am able to tell you about everything from Adam and Eve, and Daniel in the lion’s den, to the life of Ruth and how Elisha called down two she bears to eat a group of children who made fun of his particularly hairless head.  I realize that not everyone has had the fortunate childhood memories of going to church every Sunday morning and night as I have, but I was still shocked to find that my fellow Christians tested lower than non-believers. It was also shown that individuals who had received a higher amount of education knew more about the bible regardless if they were believers or not. 

After the results were shown C NBC then asked whether or not public schools should teach religion as part of the curriculum.  In my opinion yes I believe that the studies of various world religions, not just Christianity, should be added to the curriculum in public schools. Not just for the sake of educating Christians on facts that they should be receiving in Sunday school, the blame for this lack of knowledge I place on churches, but for a greater understanding of all religions. For Example many of my fellow students in high school had no idea what the Muslim faith believed, so when the topic of terrorist or 9/11 was brought up the immediate consensus was to blame all Muslims; this would be the same as calling all Germans, Nazis.

We should be educating our children on subjects that majority of cultures base their whole government and societies upon. Not educating students because of wanting to avoid offending someone will only leave our generation ignorant and unprepared for the real life issues in the world.

 Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. 66-69. Print.

Blog Numero 3

Okay sorry no real creatism here. It's been just a bit of a long day.

Questions:
1. Should personality tests really accurate?
     (Do you work well with others? Do you have problems with authority? Are you a smartaleck?  Umm let me think Hmmm let me think ... Yes. No. Yes... Oh wait that was supposed to a no. We all know that employers looking for the truth here.  There as Ms. Barbara puts it 'conveying to the potential employ' what they expect)

2. How come computers, instead of um I don't know humans,  are now being used to interview prospective employees? Has being an interviewer also been crossed off the list of tasks that humans are now considered incapable of doing?

3. I know this may be naive but is it really fair to boost up prices on apartments during the tourist season? Hotels I can understand, they get so few people in the off seasons that they need to make up the money somehow, but apartments and duplexes?

Quotes from Nickel and Dimed:
"But I am realizing that, just as in Key West, one job will never be enough. In the new version of  the law of suppy and demand, jobs are so cheap - as measured by the pay - that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can."

"How many people, other than fugitives and refugees, ever get to do something like this- blow off all past realtionships and routines, say bye-bye to those mounds of unanswered mail and voice-mail messages, and start all over again, with not much more than a driver's license and a Social Security card to provide a thread of continuity to the past? This should be exhilarating..."

Clearing the Accusations

This weekend I went home to Liberty Hill, although it is located close to Austin my little town couldn't be more different in ideals. Liberty Hill is full of conservatives and southern and independent Baptist churches.


On Sunday, my best friends mom asked me why a church would tell a teenage boy, who was up for adoption with a lesbian couple, that he would be go to Hell if he choose to live with them. This was an incident that had happened at my church on Wednesday night, and had been blown out of proportions.

I explained to her that the boy first asked the church what the bible had to say about lesbian/gay relationships. My pastor and his wife informed the boy that the bible says same sex relationships are a sin; the couple may be nice people but ‘nice people’ commit sin all the time. They continued saying that a same sex home, biblically speaking, would be as detrimental as a home where drugs and alcohol were involved. My friend’s mother still did not understand why they would tell the boy that his prospective home could be a terrible one. I told her that if you asked the church a question it is the duty of the church to tell you what the bible says about the subject that is why the church is there. She still seemed wary. I added that studies have shown that children who grow up in same sex homes are more likely to be gender confused, develop mental disorders and economic insecurity. Studies also show those children who with same sex parents have a higher likelihood of trying to commit suicide in their life.

My friend’s mom decided in the end that she felt everyone deserves to live life their own way, but agreed that if she was going to ask a church a question then she would like to hear the biblical answer.

Mrs. Roosevelts Words of Wisdom

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” - Eleanor Roosevelt


In our society today we have a vast majority of people who spend their free time talking about, Tiger Wood’s infidelity, Lindsey Lohan’s jail sentence, or Obama’s dog; however, there is a fraction of the population that deliberate over what to do about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or how to keep the tragic mishaps of Katrina from happening again, an even smaller amount of Americans converse about whether or not the health care plan is constitutional, or whether it is disrespectful to the victims of September 11th to build a Muslim mosque on ground zero, or is it ethical to allow abortions. We would rather stick our heads in the ground and live our lives in the dark if it meant that we would not have to face the trials and weighty tasks before us. It is so much easier to worry about Brad and Angelina’s problems than to have to deal with the fact that we are running out of nonrenewable resources; live in a down sliding economy, and our technology is polluting our only living space.

We need to stop prying into lives of others, and start delving into ways to better our future, economically, environmentally, and socially.