To begin with, one of the required class activities was to visit a place of worship of another religion in order to hear directly from the perspective of non-Christians. I ended up organizing two class trips, one to a Tibetan Buddhist center and one to a mosque. Besides the mere fact of seeing that non-Christian religions exist in Medellín, I think the biggest value for students was seeing how what can seem like abstract philosophies or belief systems affect the lives of their followers.
Students seemed a little taken aback at the Buddhist Center at how naturally the people there talked about reincarnation, karma, and so forth as completely common sense notions. (The person sharing wasn't Tibetan either, but a Colombian woman who has been a Buddhist for 14 years).
At the mosque, the biggest surprise for students was hearing firsthand from a Muslim about how he does not believe that Islamic extremism has any real basis in the teachings of Islam. Many, myself included, had serious questions about his interpretation of the violence in the Middle East as 100% political and having nothing to do with religion, but it does go to show how important it is to listen and understand what particular people believe rather than stereotyping people from other faiths as monolithic wholes.
In that regard, probably the most surprising thing my students have heard so far came in a class on modern Judaism this past week. Two students did a presentation on contemporary Jewish views of the Messiah and interviewed a local rabbi as part of their research. They found out that many Jews don't believe in a personal Messiah figure, that they don't think the sacrificial system is necessary for salvation, that there's not a big push among many Jews to rebuild the temple, and that it's a common Jewish viewpoint to believe in reincarnation until the individual achieves his purpose for life by living righteously. Many students seemed stunned, because the tendency is to assume that Jews today are basically the same as Jews in the time of Jesus and that the political aspirations of evangelicals who hold to certain forms of dispensational theology are also the aspirations of all Jews.
We have also had some in-class debates where students have to defend an assigned religious viewpoint to the best of their ability. The goal isn't to win the debate so much as show an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different positions and an ability to respond to common objections. Our first one was a debate between Buddhist and Christian views of the nature of the human problem and how to overcome it. This week we're having one between Christian and Muslim viewpoints on the divinity of Christ. The third debate toward the end of the course will be on whether we need to affirm the existence of God in order to make sense of ethics. This will bring together a number of strands of upcoming classes dealing with naturalism, applications of naturalistic Darwinism to broader worldview issues (especially ethics), and existentialism.
One of my biggest goals for this class is to develop critical thinking skills in students as they look at different religions and philosophies. Hopefully these activities are proving helpful for truly equipping students to engage critically with people who often think and live in drastically different ways.
