Were these things worth pointing out at school?

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crenfro

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Hello.

I’ve recently returned to school for my 3rd career change and so far, in my 2nd semester, have gotten upset twice over things - one per semester (am also wondering if this is a standard quota God’s giving me to test my faith 🙂 ).

The first was a reference to a typical Catholic as a “homosexual pedophile” in an exercise in a class over “values.”

The second was a statement in an introductory history class which said that the medieval Catholic church was oppressive to women, which I disagreed with the teacher over, and who (who = teacher) then put me down, then a few days later made some conciliatory comments without the put-downs. The teacher said he was just being honest and “telling things the way they were,” but I didn’t agree with the what the book said.

Am I simply being difficult or are these things that I ought to speak out about in my classes?

Anyway, for now I’ve decided to stick with only my technical classes because I really need to get retrained and to start back in the workforce as soon as I can.

Any comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

Thanks for listening and many blessings.
 
The most valuable thing I learned in college was how to speak up and challenge teachers, politicians, officials – even whole classes. Nothing you will ever pick up there will come near it in being worth your time and money. In fact if you speak up you will be an invaluable part of other students’ education too.👍
 
The Catholic Church and the inquisition did what they could to paint women as witches. The guide was called the Malleficarius Mallificarium.

malleusmaleficarum.org/

So your instructor was not far off the mark.

But what he (or she) misses is that religion was oppressing everybody and everything they could get their hands on, not just women, and men were often burned at the stake as well.
 
Do you already have a degree? If you are switching careers, it would seem to me that only the “technical” stuff will be of any use if you do. Of course if you are switching from technical geek to school teacher or some such you may need some non-technical courses to qualify. Having weathered a number of years in academia, I can only comment that some profs like to be questioned and some do not. It really involves a level of discretion as to which path to follow. In any case, most academics claim to be open minded, but when push comes to shove you won’t change many minds. In most "academies"we are still reaping the 60"s, when the most naive were considered the intelligent ones. Now toss the “new atheism” on top of that and we have a real “nice” stew…“When the blind leads, both fall into the pit.”
 
crenfro said:
Hello.

I’ve recently returned to school for my 3rd career change and so far, in my 2nd semester, have gotten upset twice over things - one per semester (am also wondering if this is a standard quota God’s giving me to test my faith 🙂 ).

The first was a reference to a typical Catholic as a “homosexual pedophile” in an exercise in a class over “values.”

The second was a statement in an introductory history class which said that the medieval Catholic church was oppressive to women, which I disagreed with the teacher over, and who (who = teacher) then put me down, then a few days later made some conciliatory comments without the put-downs. The teacher said he was just being honest and “telling things the way they were,” but I didn’t agree with the what the book said.

Am I simply being difficult or are these things that I ought to speak out about in my classes?

Anyway, for now I’ve decided to stick with only my technical classes because I really need to get retrained and to start back in the workforce as soon as I can.

Any comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

Thanks for listening and many blessings.
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I think I would have argued the first, as it’s blatant falsehood and quite mean-spirited and discriminatory. I don’t know that I would have argued the second one, but I probably would have pointed out that medieval society as a whole was set up to devalue women. The Church was unfortunately a product of that society, but it’s not like secular forces were any better- if anything, they were worse.
 
Starwynd said:
The Catholic Church and the inquisition did what they could to paint women as witches. The guide was called the Malleficarius Mallificarium.
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But your link says that the Catholic university the writers belonged to condemned the book. And then the Church put the book on the Index of Forbidden works.

VC
 
Verbum_Caro said:
But your link says that the Catholic university the writers belonged to condemned the book. And then the Church put the book on the Index of Forbidden works.

VC
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Thank you.
…And literally physically stood in the way of a mob that was trying to attack a supposed witch, and banned witch-hunting and so forth. The witch hunts were started by laywomen seeking an explanation of plagues that affected the young and rich first. They blamed the old and poor, who had reason to envy them. Since some old women acted strange due to dementia the rich young farm women decided the odd behavior meant the other womenw ere casting spells on them, and worked themselves into a frenzy. The Catholic Church as well as an overwhelming share of Protestant leaders turned the accusers away repeatedly, only rarely giving in to the hysteria. It was church leaders, Catholic and Protestant, who outlawed witch trials, the Catholic Church leading the way in that move to stop the mobs. They said there is no way to tellw ho is a witch unless one freely confesses, the answer to witchcraft is conversion, not jail or death, and it is easy enough to make oneself safe from witchcraft anyway.
The Church dramatically increased learning and bodily protection for girls and women in Europe from the start. Actual historic pagan societies were shockingly cruel to the most vulnerable people. Th Christian belief that everyone is actually under real, serious orders from an all-powerful God to care for one’s neighbor changed that in big ways everywhere.
 
Crenfo,
I feel your pain. Colleges are anti-Christian in general, but particularly anti-Catholic. I have no idea why; given the calmer, more scholarly nature of the Church you’d think they’d prefer it, but instead they save their worst attacks for it.

I’m so tired of biased professors >.<

And re:Witch Hunting: the Catholic church condemned even believing in Witches for quite some time, it was not universal across all of Europe, and it sure as heck wasn’t unique to the Catholics 😉
 
Verbum_Caro said:
But your link says that the Catholic university the writers belonged to condemned the book. And then the Church put the book on the Index of Forbidden works.
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No fair using facts.

– Mark L. Chance.
 
I, too, have had more than my share of opportunites to defend my faith in a classroom setting. I think one of the most important things I’ve learned is that while it is sometimes necessary to stand up for what I believe, more often the instructor is just looking to pick a fight, and I for one won’t take the bait any more. The purpose of the class is not for me to convince any one of the Catholic Church’s validity, and the odds are the instructor isn’t listening with an open mind anyway. With that being said, there are times when a person of good conscience can’t remain silent, but I’ve learned to pick my battles carefully.
 
There’s two ways of looking at this problem:
  1. Defending the faith, challenging the instructor in the classroom or in his/her office later.
  2. Ignoring it.
Pros of #1:

-you get a chance to articulate what you and quite possibly others are thinking

-there is a remote chance that the instructor will back down and give a different example

Cons:

-quite often there is subjectivity built into the grading system; openly challenging an instructor may likely lead to a poor grade

-challenging such an assertion may be counterproductive, especially if one is not as practiced in the oratory arts as many instructors are; look at politicians and the tripe they spew out…if done authoritatively, many people will believe it.

Pros and cons of #2 are just the opposite.

Going to a higher authority, such as the department head or dean is often fruitless as instructors are protected by the doctrine of “academic freedom”, which roughly translated means they can get away with pretty much saying about anything they want, as long as it’s no illegal (“That girl in the second row is a whore” would be slander, if it’s not true).

So, what to do?

IMHO the best thing to do is to document what’s been said and when, wait until the class is over and the final grades posted, then visit the instructor in the office and have a chat. Be complimentary on the parts of the course that you like, and ask him if he really believes about Catholics is true or if he’s just saying that to get a rise out his class.

If you do want to challenge him, be prepared. Ask for support for his position outside what one textbook may claim.

And don’t hold your breath or have unrealistic expectations that he’ll change his tune…

Good luck. At the present time, I’ve not had any such problems as I’m taking classes for my Master’s in Theology at a local seminary. 😃
 
Such things are going to be increasingly common in school and everyday life. Our culture believes in the inherent goodness of mankind, but has dropped belief in the FALLENNESS of mankind. As a result, evil always must be the fault of some external pressure, not an internal flaw.

Such a worldview makes it impossible to realize that the Catholic Church in every age has been imperfect (since she has always been made up of imperfect people), but was also always a step more advanced, more civilized than the culture she was a part of. That’s how Grace works. God doesn’t make a puppet of you, He invites you and offers you the power to overcome your flaws. Very few accept that offer on EVERY issue in their lives. But all believers accept it to lesser or greater degrees and so as a body, their lives tend to make the world a better place.

It is very easy to look back at history, find faults and justify your bias that the Church is the source of evil and oppression in the world due to Exhibit A, B, C, etc. Sadly that is the state of ‘history’ in most people today, even college professors.
 
Verbum_Caro said:
But your link says that the Catholic university the writers belonged to condemned the book. And then the Church put the book on the Index of Forbidden works.

VC
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They may have condemned the book but they still allowed the Inquisition to act in their name. If th church had not done so history would’ve been quite different and there may be a lot more Chriustians than there is now. As it stands the Church is still percieved by many of the non-religious to have blood on its hands for allowing this stuff to happen in its name.
 
Starwynd said:
They may have condemned the book but they still allowed the Inquisition to act in their name. If th church had not done so history would’ve been quite different and there may be a lot more Chriustians than there is now. As it stands the Church is still percieved by many of the non-religious to have blood on its hands for allowing this stuff to happen in its name.
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They perceive that because they do not know any better.
 
I think you should also take into consideration how you feel about yourself when you hear comments like that. Do you feel wrong keeping silent? That’s how I am, especially since the sex scandal broke. I feel it’s my duty to speak up when I hear falsehoods being spoken about the Church. How else are people going to learn the truth if we don’t set them straight?
 
Thank you so much for these posts. I think next time something like this comes up in one of my courses I will wait until the class is over then go and speak to the teacher, and the dean if I need to. And I won’t be so surprised when I hear another verbal attack, I’ll expect it.

I just don’t understand why some people are being anti-Catholic, especially at school. Makes no sense to me.
 
The last thing you should do is feel badly about it. If she puts you down, (and it’s always a she), it’s because she has no facts.

She has to put the Church down to justify her rejection of Its values. Then, she can make up her own and ram them down your throat. Publicly question her motives. That way, your fellow students will at least begin to think twice about what she is saying.

Then, you can look up rebuttals and share them with the class.

I would give this woman no rest.

Why do jerks like her get a platform, and we sit there and pay
them to spout it off. I would tell her to keep her opinion to herself and be a professional. If she fails you, file a grieveance against her, get your money back, and take a course with a male teacher. You are paying her, not the other way around.
 
First of all, it is often more instructive to read the literature of a particular age than it is to read what today’s sociologist types think about what things were like then.

If you read Shakespeare and Chaucer (Particularly the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in the latter) you do not come away believing women were “property” or “oppressed” or any of the things modern revisionists seem to think they were.

Unbiased histories disclose that there were queens and female nobility of all sorts then, and female heads of massive Church institutions.

Having read those things, compare the status of women disclosed in the literature of the Christian west THEN to, e.g., the status of women in the Islamic world NOW; in Japan in the mid Twentieth Century and in China presently, where people abort girls for the sole reason that they are girls.

There’s no comparison at all. Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, elevated women. What major religion has anything remotely comparable to the status of Mary in Catholicism? (Amaterasu in Shinto is understood as a myth even by Shintoists) Go into a large Catholic Church of traditional design, and you will find women saints everywhere. In the parish church I attend, the female images outnumber the male images, and I suspect that’s true in a lot of churches. There are female Doctors of the Church.

But, getting back to the other part of your post. I personally do not favor arguing with the prejudices of professors if you feel they hold them as ideological fixations. Most colleges nowadays have a lot of ideologues in them, and many won’t hesitate to downgrade you for challenging their ideologies in class.

However, most students have a lot of “out of classromm” access to other students. They are the ones to whom I would direct my counter arguments.
 
I disagree with the above poster. That is a cop-out in my view. It is this attitude of self-preservation that has encouraged it to get as far as it has.

Hey, if you don’t mind paying someone to manipulate you, go ahead and keep your mouth shut. You are a captive audience, and they know it. There is a certain standard of professionalism that they should be held to, but apparently that doesn’t matter so much any more. Facts are optional these days.
 
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