Up until college, my education was largely Christian-based. At times, it was more Christian than others (sometimes very uncomfortably Christian). As a Christian, most of the time I was fine with it, and in reality, it's not too different from a more "secular" form of education like one would receive in a public school. But in high school, I started to like it less and less because of what it led to represent--which was something very un-Christian: bigotry.
Take, for instance, biology. If you're taught biology from a Christian perspective, you basically have the idea of intelligent design drilled into you. There's nothing wrong with learning about intelligent design. In fact, everyone should. Yet there is something wrong with not learning the other side of the argument, aka what many uneducated call "evolution" which they actually mean to be microevolution (for this reason, I wasn't taught anything about the theory of evolution until I took AP biology, and only then, it was done grudgingly out of necessity).
The term "evolution" has a very dirty meaning in the Christian education system. Ignorantly, many people assume that evolution as a whole means that God didn't design the world, and that everything came about through one thing being derived from another. However, an educated Christian would realize this is ridiculous. A large portion of evolution cannot be argued, or very well at least; for example, if you have a population of a species that you separate by some biological barrier, such as a geographical barrier or reproductive barrier (this is known as allopatric and sympatric speciation, respectively), the species is going to evolve. In each case, the species is going to have adapt in some way to the change. You cannot deny that, regardless of your faith, or lack thereof.
In actuality, the part of evolution that denies intelligent design and what many Christians are probably upset about is microevolution. Microevolution basically concerns the very beginning of evolution. It attempts to answer the question of how everything came to exist. A devout Creationist would say that God created everything, and that's the end of that. But for evolutionists, the question is not so easily answered. In an attempt to prove that life could be fashioned from simple gases present in the early earth's atmosphere, there was a famous experiment done called the Miller-Urey experiment in which scientists recreated early earth's conditions in a closed system. They ran the system for a while, even recreating lightning that was present on early earth by sending electricity through it. After the experiment ran, there were a few substances present, notably, one or two amino acids, that led the scientists to conclude that life could be made just out of the air, literally.
My point in detailing this experiment is that many Christians would have a very negative reaction to this. But it fascinates me. Perhaps I don't really accept it, but I still find it intriguing. In fact, it's the clearest thing I remember from advanced biology.
Now in college, I see the "secular" side of it that I was warned of sooooo much from my past teachers. "College will try to convert you. You need to be strong in your faith. Take everything non-Christian with a grain of salt, because it's not right." I heard that about a billion times before I actually got here. On reflection, it was one of the most bigoted things I've ever heard.
In my introduction to philosophy class, we're covering philosophy of religion right now. There are so many arguments against God that I have never been aware of, and it is incredibly engaging. For the first time in my life, I am seeing the other side of the argument. And while I may not accept it, I am extremely interested. It is expanding my horizons, opening my eyes to ideas and letting me consider them for myself without the noise of others' opinions. It makes me realize how lacking my education prior to college was, because it just exemplifies how incredibly biased it was--something, I'm sure, is not Christian in any way.
I am not bashing Christianity. I am bashing bigotry, and trying to show that it actually limits your education. If you choose to only see one side of the problem, you're ignorant. The better thing to do is to fairly consider both sides of the problem and draw your own conclusions, rather than forcing your opinions on others.
Perhaps I am just extremely tolerant and open to different ideas. But shouldn't we all be? After all, education really is just the act of expanding your horizons. Why not take full advantage of that?
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