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The 17 Bottles Of project began with Urs and Sig and a bunch of other people in 1999. Unfortunately, the original, in a blue spiral notebook, has vanished. It was a fun project, though, so we're starting over. Hopefully this one will be a bit harder to misplace.
2011 UPDATE: Word on the streets is that the J.Mo. has located the notebook and has it in her possession. We'd love to see it some day...
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6 comments:
I win! I get to be superior to two groups and you only get to be superior to one! :-P
For the record, I don't find that many atheists to be annoying. The ones that ARE annoying are just as annoying to me, that's true, but I encounter far few of them than Fundies. Is that because the atheists outnumbered, or is it because as a whole they're less annoying? :)
Hahahaha--you KNOW that's you, Girl.
I'd like to say it's because we're less annoying in general. But people are people, so I have to say it's more likely that it's just because there are less of us.
We were talking about American values -- equality, freedom of speech and religion, pursuit of happiness, justice, etc -- in my critical thinking class today. I asked my students whether or not America actually lives up to the "promises" in our constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc. They, of course, said that America falls short on many levels, and we began talking about different types of discrimination.
They started with race, gender, and sexual orientation, but after a while, a student "came out" as an atheist and said that she sometimes feels discriminated against because of it. Another student said that he feels discriminated against because he's Christian. It turned in to a pretty good conversation. Nobody yelled and name-called or anything like that. They asked each other questions and had actual dialogue. It was awesome!
I'm not sure that people understand what it means to be discriminated against.
I think there are varying levels of discrimination. I doubt my student would have said that the type of discrimination he felt for being Christian was on par with what African Americans experienced in the 50s, for instance, but that doesn't mean that that no low-grade discrimination occurred. (It also doesn't mean that he didn't hallucinate it; I know that.)
My student felt -- whether rightly or not -- that he has been treated differently because of his religion. IF he truly was treated differently (in his case, he said it was being treated differently by his peers), that's discrimination. Low-grade, probably, but still discrimination.
What you have to keep in mind is that they're 18. They are fresh out of high school. They are just beginning to see the world for what it is (or what they think it is).
Think about yourself at 18. Are you horrified by how naive and stupid you were? I know I'm shocked when I think about myself at that age. I didn't know ANYTHING. I just barely knew the difference between conservative and liberal at that point, for instance. Feminism still seemed like a dirty word. My experiences with diversity were basically Dan Austin and the Hmong kids.
I tend cut my freshmen some slack when I see them struggling to figure it all out. I'm just thrilled whenever I see signs of life, and especially when I can see them struggling with their worldview and realizing that there are other ideas out there that challenge their beliefs but are still worth giving serious consideration to. In class that day, there was a lot of that going on, even if it wasn't well-articulated. It made me happy.
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