Angry Rant.

I'm beginning to think that I overestimate the intellectual capacity of college-aged students.

I tend to believe that most modern students are free-thinking individuals who are interested in righting the wrongs of our past generations by paving the path for intellectualism and understanding diversity in our society. I was almost hoping to see that we were moving past our own biases to accept everyone in society, and to value everyone's opinions. But, basically, what I am describing, is total world enlightenment.

This complaint is brought about almost entirely by my classmates this semester, and almost entirely on the topic of the Bible. I, also foolishly, believed that my generation was a little less fundamentalist than our elders. My Great Books I professor began our class teaching the Bible as a basis for Western Literature...and we didn't get very far. A group of girls, making up about one-third of our class, stopped him every five minutes to tell him how wrong he was about each book, as we read it. In vicious, bible-thumping anger, they argued the religious motivations behind the text and refused to follow the point of the lesson: to read the Bible as a book of literature that influenced modern literature around the world.

I isolated this naivete to just my Great Books class, but my Human Communication class is in "Persuasive Speech" week--and I have sat through three different speeches about the pro-life movement. I take no issue with opinions that differ from mine, but there is little that angers me more than an argument formed entirely on the Bible (a book that only some of America views as a guiding light), or an argument that is formed entirely around biased sources. "God has a plan for each human being, and thinks murder is wrong. Why kill your child?" was a point made by a girl who just spoke on this subject today. How poorly-educated are we as a generation that our argument revolves entirely around a religion that only half of the class adheres to? Is this appeal from the Bible supposed to convince the atheist in the corner to not kill her child? No mention was made of the emotional ramifications of abortion on the mother, which would be one legitimate argument against abortion.

I think the important question to ask in this situation is: Do our religious beliefs belong in our academics and science? The answer is: No. Unfortunately, it would appear that most of the student population that I have encountered thinks the two are interchangeable.