Why Are We Forced To Do Religion For JC?

Terri26

The "creators of the course" have nothing to do with the textbooks.

AtomicKoala

Terri26 wrote: »

The "creators of the course" have nothing to do with the textbooks.

Ah sorry, I meant the textbooks, even. My apologies

MegGustaa

Junior Cert Religion is a joke. All it served to do was make me more sure of my atheism.

I got a 100% in my mock (and an A in the real thing) and I'm easily the most outspokenly-atheistic person in my class.

However, I'm a better informed atheist because of it. Just because I don't agree with religion or theism doesn't mean I shouldn't be educated about it, and be able to defend why I think religion is a bad thing.

My Religious Education was definitely very Christian-biased, and 2 hours a week in Senior Cycle (not even as an LC subject like) is also a bit annoying, when I only get 80 mins of Applied Maths, but I'm in a private, fee-paying Catholic school so I can hardly complain.

xfabgalx

kelijryan wrote: »

the religion that is usualy in the jc isnt just about catholics, its about all world religions and how they started and what their culture is it can be interesting at times

thats not true! we were told not to bother with that because we're all either christians or not religious. its so stupid. hate the subject. there was a scheduled class one or twice a week in my old school but we used to just do homework and that and its ridiculous now. my old school was apart of the same VEC!
just ask your parents to make you exempt no matter how stupid or nervous or different or whatever it may be. as long as the school isnt a religious school like loreto should be fine. Im gonna ask. I dont think Ill go in when the RE junior cert exam is on. pointless.


We always joke about stuff like: Just say it was what Jesus wants! And Jesus said so just say Jesus in every line and you'll be fine sure! Im a christian and I dont care about RE. We use that horrible book "KNOW THE WAY". So annoying.

ehshup

The subject religion means you study religion - a lot of people are making it out to be a sunday-school like class - that's not the point of the lesson. It doesn't matter whether you're a hardcore atheist or devout believer. The purpose is to learn about the origins and beliefs about different people around the world - whether this works as a class is a different question but in response to why you are made do it - it's definitely somthing which affects the world. If you read any frontpage news article about war, etc etc, i think you'll find out pretty quickly that knowing about religion helps - a basic knowledge of religion will help you understand things like the israeli-palestinian conflict, the shi'a sunni relations.

The fact you don't believe in a god doesn't diminish the value of knowledge which explains how so many conflicts have begun. Contrary to what you say, writing "God is wonderful" will not suffice - maybe your teacher is crazy, but the exam does not take into account where you stand with religion - it asks about the origins of religions - It doesn't claim Christianity is right and Islam is wrong or anything like that. It asks what do Christians/Muslims/Jews believe.

Being an athiest is irrelevant - it's like someone saying why do we have to learn Shakespeare plays for english, or about Mozart in music - maybe we don't like Shakespeare or are not fans of Mozart, however if we are to have an understanding of how literature or music developed, it is important to at least know about the existence of Shakespeare and Mozart - Likewise, even if one doesn't believe in a god, is it not still important to understand how islam, buddhism, judaism and christianity have evolved?

MegGustaa

ehshup wrote: »

The subject religion means you study religion - a lot of people are making it out to be a sunday-school like class - that's not the point of the lesson. It doesn't matter whether you're a hardcore atheist or devout believer. The purpose is to learn about the origins and beliefs about different people around the world - whether this works as a class is a different question but in response to why you are made do it - it's definitely somthing which affects the world. If you read any frontpage news article about war, etc etc, i think you'll find out pretty quickly that knowing about religion helps - a basic knowledge of religion will help you understand things like the israeli-palestinian conflict, the shi'a sunni relations.

The fact you don't believe in a god doesn't diminish the value of knowledge which explains how so many conflicts have begun. Contrary to what you say, writing "God is wonderful" will not suffice - maybe your teacher is crazy, but the exam does not take into account where you stand with religion - it asks about the origins of religions - It doesn't claim Christianity is right and Islam is wrong or anything like that. It asks what do Christians/Muslims/Jews believe.

Being an athiest is irrelevant - it's like someone saying why do we have to learn Shakespeare plays for english, or about Mozart in music - maybe we don't like Shakespeare or are not fans of Mozart, however if we are to have an understanding of how literature or music developed, it is important to at least know about the existence of Shakespeare and Mozart - Likewise, even if one doesn't believe in a god, is it not still important to understand how islam, buddhism, judaism and christianity have evolved?

I completely see where you're coming from - I appreciate fully the value of learning about all religions - however the curriculum and how it's being delivered don't actually do that.

You see, it's a very clever syllabus. There are 6 modules to it and you only have to do 5. Two of them deal specifically with Christianity, only 1 deals with World Religions in any great depth. We, of course, left out the world religions section - no surprise there - but even if we hadn't we'd still have had to do a deep study of Christianity. Ta-da.

Personally, I think the study of religion is fascinating. However I have never once learned about the conflict in the Middle East in an RE classroom, in my 5 years of compulsory RE. I've learned more about world religions from my English teacher (an atheist) than I have from any religion teacher.

Religious Education in this country is predictably biased towards Christianity - whether or not that's explicitly written in the syllabus is besides the point. It's like 'here's how other people do this, oh isn't that interesting, but really you should believe in our God if you know what's good for you'. Religious Education should be taught in a setting where one religion is not favoured over another, so honest and open learning and discussion can take place. A school with a Christian/Catholic ethos is hardly the place for it, and let's face it, most schools in this country are religious (and by that, I mean Christian) to some degree, fee paying or not.

I think Religious Ed should be replaced with secular philosophy classes (with no exam), but...this is Ireland, that's never going to happen.

ehshup

MegGustaa wrote: »

I completely see where you're coming from - I appreciate fully the value of learning about all religions - however the curriculum and how it's being delivered don't actually do that.

You see, it's a very clever syllabus. There are 6 modules to it and you only have to do 5. Two of them deal specifically with Christianity, only 1 deals with World Religions in any great depth. We, of course, left out the world religions section - no surprise there - but even if we hadn't we'd still have had to do a deep study of Christianity. Ta-da.

Personally, I think the study of religion is fascinating. However I have never once learned about the conflict in the Middle East in an RE classroom, in my 5 years of compulsory RE. I've learned more about world religions from my English teacher (an atheist) than I have from any religion teacher.

Religious Education in this country is predictably biased towards Christianity - whether or not that's explicitly written in the syllabus is besides the point. It's like 'here's how other people do this, oh isn't that interesting, but really you should believe in our God if you know what's good for you'. Religious Education should be taught in a setting where one religion is not favoured over another, so honest and open learning and discussion can take place. A school with a Christian/Catholic ethos is hardly the place for it, and let's face it, most schools in this country are religious (and by that, I mean Christian) to some degree, fee paying or not.

I think Religious Ed should be replaced with secular philosophy classes (with no exam), but...this is Ireland, that's never going to happen.

I agree with most of that, but the problem, I think, is then that individual religion teachers can try to turn the class into a brainwashing class of indoctrination. As for the bias towards learning about chrisianity, I don't think that's too bad, because (in my experience anyway) we learned about christianity from a historic point of view - how it developed, what it's starting ideas were etc etc - and to be honest, out of the world religions, christianity is the one which is most relevant to life in ireland which is (perhaps) why there is more of a bias towards it. A little bit like the way the history course focuses on European history - but anyway, yes, i'd agree that it'd be much better to make the world religion section compulsory and make one of the christianity ones optional - but I do think that if you look at the exam itself, its questions aren't biased.

At the same time, I understand what you mean - I think we may just have different experiences in education - in my school, there was almost no emphasis on christianity - we learnt about it in first year (approaching it almost from a foreign perspective so we understood it) , then in second year and third year we learned about Judaism and Islam, and I can speak for my class when I say that after we took the exam we all agreed we knew much more about Islam than Christianity. Also, it helped that the book we used didnt shove anything down our throats - as opposed to the most ridiculous religion textbook I saw recently where practically every single argument they used to say Jesus was God used absolute circular logic. They tried to prove that Jesus was definitely a miracle worker by saying it's "clearly true" as his miracles were of a "much higher calibre" than those of other apprent miracle workers at the time. Now if I constantly had that being taught to me, then I would agree, but personally I thought I learned a lot from junior cert religion (despite not being religious at all.)