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Religion(s)Ronald Kephart (rkephart@OSPREY.UNF.EDU)Sat, 6 Apr 1996 13:01:51 -0500
the area where it's hardest to get students to maintain a cultural relativist perspective. The reason, as discussed by both Richard Calo and Bill Lesley, seems to be that they assume that their own system of belief is "true" and that others are "false." It's very hard to get them to see that that is, in fact, an ethnocentric attitude. One thing that seems to help (at least for me) is to use the framework in Harris' text "People Culture Nature" where the term "cult" is used to describe any particular system of religious belief. This turns the students off at first, because they aren't used to thinking of their own catholic, baptist, etc. set of beliefs and behaviors as a cult; but using that label, I think, helps them to distance themselves a little from what is normally a very strongly internalized domain. Incidentally, most of my teaching on religion takes place in a course on the Caribbean, where they learn about Haitian vodoun (among other things). So you can imagine the distorted notions they come in with! It occurs to me that this religion and mythology issue also feeds into the evolution-creation debate, and the difficulty we have in convincing people that creationism as reported in the Bible is a myth (Darwin thought that the publication of his findings would be the end of religion; to paraphrase Gerald Ford, if he were alive today, he'd turn over in his grave!). Ronald Kephart Department of Language & Literature University of North Florida Jacksonville, FL 32224 ph: (w) 904-646-2580 (h) 904-268-4250
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