Spring Term Point Distribution Etc.

 Via email 22 Feb 2010:

Seniors:  We will be going on spring break in three weeks.  Over the break I will be preparing your mid-term grade reports, which are due the week we come back into session.  Printed below is a point distribution matrix for spring term so that you can see the big picture.  Your midterm grade will be based on observed classroom behavior, online posts, and the following written assignments:

(4) 1-page response papers (one on each film we watched)

(4)  weekly paragraphs related to world religions (2 assigned so far)

(1)  expository essay (draft is due with usual underlining and cover letter 05 March)

(1)  monkey group assignment to outline world religion exam question (see below, which               is excerpted from the unit overview distributed at the beginning of the unit; you need to prepare it in a way that individual contributions are clear and post it for the class on our weblog by 12 March).

At this point, I am not accepting submissions of weekly work or response papers that were due before today.  I’m just going to assume you made a tactical choice to skip the assignment and forego the credit. 

 

Item	Points	Notes
Expository #1	12
Hamlet Project	12
May paper	12
Weekly Paragraphs	11	Maximum of 1pt each
Class Participation; documented critical engagement over time	30	Includes seminar, small groups, online, journal, et al
Term exam	15
Film response papers	8
Total required	100
Challenge Project	7	Optional
Challenge Presentation	3	Optional
Total possible	110

2.  Prepare to answer this question on the final exam.  You will find the Smith book helpful here, in addition to our work in the classroom.

Discuss the four religions we studied this term (Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam).  With regard to each, please discuss

            A) the relationship between the divine and the human;

            B) the elements and purposes of religious practice;

            C) the form and goal of the religious community.

3.  Contribute to your group’s notes, to be posted for the whole group no later than 12 March.  Each monkey group is responsible for preparing an outline to the exam question for one of the four religions.  Group #1 is responsible for Judaism, Group #2 for Christianity, Group #3 for Buddhism, Group #4 for Islam. 

Comments

[Group # 2]

Christianity Study Guide
Group # 2

A.The Relationship Between The Divine And Human
by Sophie

Although The World’s Religions focuses primarily on Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, Christianity is made up of an impossible number of branches and specific sects. Each sect differs in the beliefs and doctrines it chooses to preach and emphasize. It is therefore impossible to say exactly what Christianity as a whole believes regarding the relationship between the divine and the human. Nevertheless, these three themes can offer some insight into some of Christianity’s overarching beliefs.

• Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary:
1. Christianity is a historical religion, founded in concrete events as opposed to abstract principles. For example, we know that Jesus was born in Palestine, grew up near Nazareth, and led a life of teaching and healing until his death at 33. The fact that Jesus had a history, the knowledge that he walked and talked and breathed, suggests that Christians believe that divine traits lie in mortals and immortals alike.
2. Indeed, The World’s Religions stresses the way in which Jesus’ true holiness did not lie in his supernatural powers, but in his goodness. “(The disciples) found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form that is how it would behave” (324). He was believed to be the utmost example of selflessness and sincerity; and thus the bridge between the human and the divine.
3. Christians believe: “Slavish imitation of details is never creative, but insofar as Christ’s love, his freedom, and the daily beauty of his life can find their authentic parallels in our own we are carried Godward, for the traits are authentically divine” (341).
4. There is controversy over whether Jesus was wholly divine, wholly man, or both. Some say that “holding as it does that in Christ God assumed a human body, it affirms that Christ was God-Man; simultaneously both fully God and fully man” (340). Others believe that because Christ endured his experiences in the same way all humans do, he could have only been man.

• Connection with God and the Spirit
1. Christians may feel a direct connection with Jesus Christ, but the same cannot be said for God. God is always more good, more perfect. Jesus once said, “Why do you call me good? Don’t you know that only God is good?” Though Eastern Orthodoxy beliefs that “the aim of every life should be union with God,” the most many Christians hope for is to serve and to be led by God.
2. “Given faith in God’s goodness, everything of importance follows. In its absence, nothing can take its place” (358).
3. God is distinctly separate from humans, though we were created in his image. The World Religion’s says that because God was willing to assume a human life of the form that Jesus exemplified, the Mediterranean world found a different and possibly more human God than they had known before. Beyond that however, God is otherworldly, all-powerful, and immortal.
4. The Spirit refers to the unseen order as described by William James: “in its broadest terms, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme god lies in rightful relations to it.” In Jesus’ time, the Spirit was an invisible entity with superiority over nature and ability to fill souls with the supernatural powers. The Spirit went unseen unless it chose to announce itself.

• The Bible and the Church
1. Like many religions, the church is a means of further closing the gap the human and divine. As church is the body of Christ and humans carriers of Christ’s teachings, the connection between the human and the divine becomes strong.
2. In Roman Catholicism, connection with God is reachable through the seven sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders, Sacraments of the Sick, Reconciliation, and Mass. “Each is a means by which God, through Christ’s mystical body, literally infuses into human souls the supernatural power that enables them so to live in this world that in the world to come they may have life everlasting” (351).
3. For Protestants, it is the Bible that brings one closer to God. “In (the Bible’s) account of God working through Israel, through Christ, and through the early Church, we find the clearest picture of God’s great goodness, and how human beings may find new life in fellowship with the divine. In this sense the Bible is, for Protestants, ultimate. It is ultimate in the sense that when human beings read this record of God’s grace with true openness and longing for God, God stands at the supreme intersection between the divine and the human” (361).

B) The elements and purposes of religious practice.
by Ali

There are three main branches of Christianity. Each teaches through the Bible, Sacraments, and religious teachers, and has goals of salvation, unity with God, and absolute faith. However, each branch emphasizes different aspects of Christianity, and within each branch are many other mutations that also have differing beliefs and goals.

Roman Catholicism

- The purpose of religious practice is to find the way to salvation. Catholics believe that God came in the form of Jesus in order to teach people to live so they could achieve eternal life.
- The Bible is believed to be Jesus’ continuing teaching representative on earth. The church helps to interpret the Bible and give people direction, much as the Supreme Court helps to interpret the Constitution.
- The Pope speaks officially about faith and morals. Catholics believe that God always backs up his word, and so he is infallible on issues of faith and morals.
- The Sacraments are means by which “God, through Christ’s mystical body, literally infuses into human souls the supernatural power that enables them to live in this world that in the world to come they may have life everlasting” (351)
- There are seven sacraments. The first five mark the main turning points in people’s lives: Baptism, Confirmations, Holy Matrimony or Holy Orders (when one dedicates his/her life to God), Sacrament of the Sick (performed at death). The next two must be repeated frequently throughout life: Confession and Mass.
- Catholics acknowledge that all people make mistakes. Confession allows people to be forgiven for their sins if they confess genuinely to God in the presence of a priest, repent, and resolve to avoid sin in the future.
- Mass is a reenactment of the last supper. Catholics believe that in the host (bread) and chalice (wine), Christ’s body and blood are literally present. This means that in mass, there is an actual transfusion of spiritual energy from God to human souls.

Eastern Orthodoxy

-The Eastern Church broke with the Catholic Church in 1054, so they have distinct similarities. The Eastern Church honors the same seven sacraments and interprets them the same way the Roman Church does.
- Ecumenical Councils are conferences of Bishops of the entire Christian church. The Bishops get together and discuss and settle matters of church Doctrine and Practice.
- The Eastern Orthodox Church only accepts the first seven Ecumenical Councils, all of which were held before 787. This is in stark contrast with the Roman Catholic Church, which stresses the development of the Christian Doctrine and continues to have Ecumenical Councils to this day. The Easter Orthodox Church believes in the continuity and interpretation of the Christian Doctrine but claims that there is no need for the Church to initiate its teaching authority outside of the first seven Ecumenical Councils.
- There is no Pope in the Easter Orthodox church. The administration is not hierarchical like the Roman Catholic Church, and congregations have more say in the selection of the clergy.
- The Eastern Orthodoxy emphasizes the “corporate nature of the Church.” (353-5) It believes that God’s truth is disclosed to all (rather than just one: the Pope), and so people must work together. Each Christian must work out his or her salvation in conjunction with the rest of the Church, and cannot work individually to save individual souls.
- The Eastern Orthodoxy encourages mystical life actively. The supernatural world “should be part of Christian life in general to develop the capacity to experience directly the glories of God’s presence” (353)
- The aim of every life should be union with God

Protestantism

- Protestants emphasize faith. Beliefs and doctrine can be accepted second-hand, but personal faith teaches service and love through experience rather than study.
- Holds faith higher than creeds and sacraments because unless such things are accompanied by the experience of God’s love and love for God, they are insufficient.
- Protestants see the world as finite and God as infinite. They are very careful about idolatry—it is easy to slip and equate God with the visible, touchable, or easy to understand. Protestants see the dogmas, Sacraments, Church, and Bible as forms of idolatry, because they have all been processed by human hands, and humans are imperfect. Likewise, they do not accept Papal infallibility.
- Protestants participate in constant self-criticism and reformation because they see themselves as committing idolatry frequently.
- Out of all of the possible forms of idolatry listed above, Protestants see the Bible as the closest to God’s true word. “There, more than anywhere else in the world of time and space, people have the prospect of catching, not with their minds alone but with their whole beings, the truth about God and the relation in which God stands to their lives.” (361)

Section C will be posted later

[Group #4]

Group #4 - Isaac, Sam, Rylee, and Isaiah
A.

-"Islam" means "submission" or "surrendering" to the religion
-acceptance of "small freedom," meaning that we are the masters of our own actions within the actions that are provided for us by God
-we aspire to be like God in his piety, but recognize that we can never be him; we are imperfect, and just need to try our best
-faith lies between "fear" and "hope"
-Jihad; striving for justice, surrender to the will of God
-no male or female concept of God within the religion
-our intentions count the most
(Isaac and Isaiah)

B.

-prayer 5 times a day to ask for forgiveness, assistance, etc.; remember how God wants us to live our lives
-fasting is to help remind us of God; be thankful, kind, and helpful
-5 pillars of Islam
-confession to one God
-daily prayer
-fasting from dawn to sunset during Ramadan
-pilgrimage to Mecca to perform duty to God
-abstaining from impurities
(Sam and Rylee)

C.

-desire to spread the religion to those who accept and believe it
-daily prayer with other members of community
-Ramadan and other religious ceremonies are carried out with family, friends, and other members of the community
-living pure lives that come as close as possible to the standards shown to them by the messengers of god.
-Be constantly aware of God
-help create the fair, equal, just world that Muhammed envisioned and is set down in the Kuran
-Very socially explicit: Koran teaches social rules (every Muslim is a brother or sister to every other Muslim and must therefore act with "dignity and courtesy" towards others.)
-Islamic law ensures that wealth is continuously circulated while still allowing those who work the hardest to share the greatest part of the reward.
-Islam stresses racial equality and is happy to intermarry with other religions and races.
-According to the Koran, a "righteous" war must be founded on either self-defense or the desire to "right a wrong."
-The Koran allow wrongdoers to be punished by the people they have wronged to "the full extent of their [imparted] injuries,” but in a Hadith, or saying, ranks battle with internal enemies (such as character flaws and immoral desires) above battle with external enemies.
(Isaac, Sam, Rylee, and Isaiah)

[Rosie, Jeannie, Alice, John]

Buddhism

Rosie and John each did a first draft of A&B, Alice did B&C, Jeannie did A&C, and we all worked together to compile our versions and edit them into the final outline.

A – Relationship between the Human and the Divine
While Buddhism has no concept of an almighty divine being controlling everything like an almighty God, Buddhist have an idea of a divine nature within every human. They also believe that humans have the potential to recognize the divine within oneself. Yet we want to be careful with this idea of God within, because it would be easy to draw the conclusion that this makes the individual an isolated, self-sustaining being, finding all it needs by looking inward on itself. This would be quite a misconception, for when we look into ourselves we realize our “selves” have no boundaries. Essentially, one looks into oneself and finds the world. Perhaps the closest one can reach to “divinity” in Buddhism is Nirvana, the ultimate stage of enlightenment and liberation, and the absence of suffering. Nirvana is being awake, seeing the world in all its marvels, and everything as connected.

B- The elements and purpose of this religious practice
-Meditation is the principle element of practicing Buddhism. The goal in meditation to not follow distractions, to explore one’s mind, to be awake but not drift into thought or sleep and to practice a mental discipline.

-The Eight Fold Path is a guideline that Buddhist try to follow in their daily lives. It can be considered an awareness of one’s own feelings and of others’ perspectives, and one of the main ideas behind it is to be present in the moment. The steps are practiced simultaneously rather than in an order.
1. Right View.
2. Right Intention (thought)
3. Right Speech (silence)
4. Right Action (discipline)
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Absorption (meditation)
C- The Form and Goal of the Religious Community
• The practitioner has a teacher who has reached a certain point of enlightenment, so the teacher helps guide their students or point them in a direction. There may be more than one teacher at a time for one student. This teacher may and usually does change throughout the practitioner’s life and practice.
• One goal of the Buddhist religious community is for support and commitment. Communities can support their practitioners by letting them sit in peace in the morning, undisturbed by the sounds and smells of other people having breakfast or getting ready to leave the house. Community also helps practitioners make a commitment to their practice because they know other people expect them to come to their meditation group at a specific time.
• Beyond the community they practice with, many Buddhists are aware of the world-view that they share with people all over the world, feeling connected to all the people who sit in meditation with the goal of enlightenment.
• The term “sangha” generally means some form of the Buddhist religious community. For some it can mean those you practice with, for others it might be a term reserved for those with a certain level of enlightenment, or it might simply mean all the other Buddhists in the world.

[Steph]

Judaism: Steph, Becka, Zephyr Will (group 1) * Some of the notes are adapted from the notes handed out to us from Bob

Judaism: The Elements and Purposes
- by Becka and Steph

Elements:
No word for “sin”:The Hebrew word “chet” is often translated into English as “sin”, however in Judaism it is translated as “missing the mark.” There is a remedy to this: try harder. Even when one does something ethically wrong and is distanced from the original, pure self, one can return to that state through the process called “teshuva.”

Choice: Humans have completely free choice, and therefore have absolute responsibility, for doing both good and evil.

The soul is pure and indestructible – no mistakes and compromise purity: no original sin. No hell in Judaism.

Teshuva (return) when we do anything that is ethically wrong, or evil, teshuva brings us back to our original, pure self (like a rubber band, trying to pull you back)

The Three Pillars of spiritual practice:

Ritual: prayer three times a day (morning, afternoon, and night).
Social: taking care of those unable to care for themselves, thereby sustaining and forming communities
Ethical: awareness of self and of one's place in the natural world. Avoiding unnecessary destruction and practicing kindness and respect to animals (including the methods of slaughter).

The Reading of the Sacred Texts

There are several Jewish Sacred Texts
- God lives in the sacred texts (he is portable).
- There is periodic paragraph break but no punctuation or vowels in text. This leaves much much room for interpretation (Lets eat Grandma! v. Lets eat, Grandma!)
- P R D S – how we interoperate the texts and scripture readings; (P – simple, R – hint, D – search, S – hidden) (could mean PaRaDiSe)
- They include:

Tanakh:The Tanakh is the oldest of the sacred books, and is sometimes called the Jewish Bible and the Hebrew Scriptures. The Tanakh consists of three parts: the Torah, Nevi'im (the Prophets), and K'tuvim (the Writings) and its name comes from the first letter of each of the Hebrew words for the texts.
The Torah consists of the Five Books of Moses.

Talmud:The Talmud is the the oral tradition of the Jewish people and was written down and compiled between 200 CE and 500 CE. It contains records of discussions,debates etc. that occurred between the rabbis concerning the ways to live out the teachings of the Torah. In the Talmud all opinions were recorded, even the minority.

Midrash: stories about the Torah,

Kabbalah: works of ancient Jewish mysticism. Includes the Zohar.

Traditions/ Rituals

Bah/ Bat Mitzvahs
Hanukkah
Rosh Hashanah
Passover
Yom Kippur
Sabbath: After the creating the world in six days, God took the seventh day to rest. The Sabbath therefore is a time of appreciating and accepting the world as it is. One should not alter, or think about altering or improving the world on this day. Recall the story of the man in the orchard.

Purposes:

Not to do acts upon others you would not have done unto you.
To repair the world and humans from the Fall from Eden through “Tzedekah”( doing acts of love and justice).
Working toward the perfection that was lost in the Fall
To question everything.
Accepting responsibility.
A purpose does not include proselytizing.
Perfect the world and human (perfection is creating a just, loving, peaceful society; through doing Tzedekah, or acts of love and justice)

Relationship between the Divine and the Human
- by Zephyr and Will

In Judaism there are no individuals who claim to have a direct link to god. In other words there is not priest class, or higher authority on earth. Any individual, in a time of desperate need, can contact god. God is always there for humans. But god is not there in the sense of a man, or human form; god cannot even be conceptualized. He has no form and no man knows how to speak his name because it is represented by the consonants “YHVH”. He is an all powerful being, a leader and creator of the world. He is never seen by man, but he has been known to speak through certain objects like burning bushes, think Moses, or send messages: in the form of a white dove bearing a twig. God can also simply shout down from the heavens. It seems as if he can choose which people hear him. For example, in the desert all the Jews hear God's words from above, then god speaks only to Moses on the mountaintop. It is also important to note that Judaism has a different relationship to god than Christianity or Islam. In Judaism the word of God is constantly supposed to be questioned and debated. The word of god is not taken concretely as meaning one thing. The Torah and god are to be always questioned. The human soul is also pure and cannot be made impure. The human being and thus the world also have the capability to be perfected. Therefore God is not necessarily more pure or more intelligent than all humans.

The Form and Goal of the Religious Community.
By Steph and Group

- work toward tikkun olam : make right and repair the injustices and brokenness of the world caused by the fall from Eden. Due the fall from Eden, what was perfect, no longer is and the community strives to regain and restore this perfection. (Salvation = healing the world, God as savior and redeemer = God being partner in the healing of the world.)
- bring love and justice to the world (mitzvah) – an act of loving-kindness that joins us to God and to all creation. Mitzvah means interconnectedness of all things (joining together)
- the ten commandments from the Old Testament
- Sabbath day: everyone goes to the temple on the Sabbath day – unifies everyone. (you can walk into any temple anywhere in the world, and the same exact scriptures are being read, and the same traditions are being carried out)
- (see above) every 7th day we take a break, every 7 years the land takes a break from being used for farming, every 7x7 years there is a jubilee; all land goes back to its original owner (score = 0:0) This is conducive of not being greedy. It spreads the money around and acts as an equalizer).