Σελίδες

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Types of Religious Education Teachers

...we have had. They are presented in chronological order.










I have no idea who this is.
#1 The Actual Priest.
Because in Greece you can do that. So, the priest. Nice, friendly, caring as long as you say the prayer correctly. If you didn't, he was still nice and friendly and caring because he believed you are strong enough to find the correct path eventually. He made us learn the Credo and the Ten Commandments by heart, but to his defence, he was forced to by the educational system.












#2 The Guiet One
Τhe prayer in Greek
The type of man that is too good. We never found out if he was extremely religious or not, but we realised he couldn't possibly control a whole class of 14 year olds. Forced by the system (I'm not being ironical), he made us learn the titles of the books of the New Testament in order, by heart. I still remember all of the titles and maybe if I try, I'll remember the order.

Important note: We say a prayer every day, from the first day of elementary school (age 6), until the last day of highchool (age 18). It's a prayer in a more simple form of ancient greek.There was no teacher to actually tell us what it meant, we were only told to listen to the others and we would eventually learn it. No one translated it for us or told us what it meant and after some years, even if you can understand what most of it means, you say it mechanically every morning. And one day, at age 17, your teacher tells your class to write to prayer down and translate it, like some sort of surprise test. A prayer we say every morning, that however no one bothered to teach us when we were younger. But yes, let's learn all the books of the New Testament by heart, who cares that you have no idea what do you pray for every morning?

#3 The F*ck the System Guy
If we saw him on the street, we would never have guessed that this guy could ever be a religious education teacher. And the wasn't the normal kind. Instead of doing all the boring stuff like practically preaching about the love of God, pretending a classroom is a church, he showed us videos about the catacombs where the christians were hiding when the Romans were after them, he talked to us about deeper meanings and how religion can (?) be compatible with the world of the 21st century, he even showed us some exorcisms of Youtube. The system I was talking about in the previous two teachers doesn't apply here. System? Fuck the system. He was such an unconditional R.E. teacher, that there were rumors about his being gay. Imagine.



#4 The Stupid Bitch
She is the normal church lady; tries to appear kind and loving, if you follow her rules and only her ruled.
I have no idea who she is either. I just googled "bigoted woman".
In reality is a shit-talker and you will not get a nice note if you disagree with me in class. Trust me, she is that kind of person.
 She is also the kind of person that will start talking about how much God loves us and will eventually end up talking about how awful homosexual people are, how abortions are disgusting, how premarital sex is wrong (because let's not forget, for God a woman must be a virgin to get married, or else the marriage is unvalid) and all those kinds of stuff.

Merci beacoup,
Vaya

Friday, April 10, 2015

Plato's Symposium and the Holy Bible

Bonjour et bonsoir,
I've been hanging out with this friend of mine, who is really relegious and homophobic. (Nice way to start a post, I know, I'm great at this).
 We were talking about homosexuality and I brought up the subject of the ancient Greeks having homosexual relationships with each other. Now, us Greeks take way too much pride in our ancestors and the types of people like my friend refuse to accept this well known fact, because it's supposed to be degrading.
So, I told her that I'd bring her Plato's Symposium, that has a lot of parts that prove my statement. I own a copy, that contains the ancient prototype and a translation. I marked the pages and underlined the sentences, I gave it to her and after a couple of days, I asked her if she has read it.
She said "No, I refuse to believe it". Not in a "I know it's true but I refure to believe it" way, but in a "I refuse to believe you brought me this book fool of lies" way. She then asked me how did I know that the translation was correct and that it didn't alter things. I then told her that the Symposium was also translated by monks in the Byzantine empire, that probably none of them wanted to admit that our marvelous ancestors did those horrible horrible things. In short, none of those monks would want to alter the prototype in that way.
But I understand that this argument is not that strong.
We stopped talking about this at that point. But of course I kept thinking.
Plato's Symposium is a script that generally describes some peoples' opinions of what is love.  It talks about homosexuality, that, even if it was unnatural, it can happen. Completely philosophical, but nothing that is impossible to happen by the laws of nature, like, for example,*ahem* a man walking in the water and a virgin woman giving birth.
So that's Plato's Symposium. A script describing something that can naturally happen.
But what about the Holy Bible? It wasnt written in a specific year of location. Let's say the Old Testament was written around 1400 BC and the New Testament around 50 AD. Plato's Symposium was written around 416 BC (sources for those below).
The Holy Bible contains incidents that are impossible to happen if one follows the laws of nature that are called "miracles" and also some dreams that are called " visions". From an impartial perspective, they are unnatural incidents (walking in the water, splitting water in half, vigrin giving birth while impregnated by rays of sunshine etc etc) and dreams.
She chooses to stricly believe in scripts that talk about unnatural incidents and dreams people had more than 2000 years ago and she refuses to believe a script that describes a philosophical conversation that happened around the same years as the first book. If she wants to characterise Symposium unreliable because of the years that have passed, then she should also rethink about believing in the Holy Bible.
Thank you for reading this rant,
Vaya

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_%28Plato%29#Historical_context
http://www.biblica.com/en-us/bible/bible-faqs/when-was-the-bible-written/