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Originally Posted by Sliver
Well as a former student of UC's religious studies program, let me share with you what I saw as a flaw in the entire faculty. The department has no interest in searching for truth. It's the only faculty in a university (that I can think of) that operates like this.
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I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "truth" here...
Did you know upon entry into the Department of Religion that it is a branch within the
Faculty of HUMANITIES? I've been doing this for some time now, and in my experience I have yet to encounter any single department in the humanities that considers "truth" to be the central component of their discipline; at least not in the way that you seem to mean it here.
"Truth" in literature? "Truth" in art? "Truth" in culture? How does one calculate such things?
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Originally Posted by Sliver
Though unconscious of it at the time, I was waiting for the course that would finally address the only questions that mattered: what aspects of which religions are true, and which are false?
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By what measure and in what context "true" and "false"? What aspects of George Bernard Shaw's plays are "true" and "false"?
What a weird question to ask in this context...
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Originally Posted by Sliver
I mean, all my astronomy, geophysics, geology, sociology, psychology, etc. classes operated this way and I was mistakenly holding religious studies to the same standard.
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Yes, this approach to "truth" (although I don't really like your use of the word here) works fairly well in the pursuit of the natural sciences, but I seriously doubt that you encountered much "truth" in your studies in sociology and psychology. More likely A LOT of method, theory, pattern detection, statistics and other fun stuff that speaks meaningfully to the phenomena of social emergence and human behaviour, but not much in the way of "truth".
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Originally Posted by Sliver
Turns out the way in which religion is studied is flawed.
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I won't argue with you there.
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Originally Posted by Sliver
For instance, it's my opinion that you shouldn't be teaching religion in a secular university. It'd be like a creationist teaching a paleontology course.
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Come again? How on earth does this analogy function? Are you speaking of me directly, or does this apply to all university teachers of religion? Who "should" be teaching religion in the universities?
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Originally Posted by Sliver
Religion should be studied using the scientific method. Establishing the history of religios beliefs is fine, but it stops short.
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So, maybe you can help me then:
My discipline within religious studies is biblical literature, and more specifically the emergence, development and transmission of scripture and its interpretation in Judaism between 500 BCE–100 CE. I study original manuscripts in their original languages, and against a panoply of other disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, and geography among others. I am most concerned to locate intentions of authors and meanings supplied by readers, and how these inform us about their own respective world views and circumstances.
...so what precisely am I doing wrong, and what should I be doing to conform more closely to the "scientific method"?
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Originally Posted by Sliver
With so many people believing in so much malarkey, the point of religious studies in a secular university - in addition to the history, context, beliefs - should be about proving and disproving religious claims.
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Well, that's a bit of a mouthful right there. "Proving and disproving religious claims"? Maybe you were not paying attention during your courses on the historical Jesus or the history of Israel, but there is MUCH discussion (or, there is in my courses) about "what actually happened". In my opinion, the general goal of religious studies ought to be informing students about the insatiably influential universal cultural phenomena of religion. It's an integral part of human behaviour, which is precisely why it deserves so much attention.