How’s The Exam Marking Going?

This is a tweet I composed today but couldn’t be bothered to explain so didn’t end up sending:

Seriously - one question about the compatibility between the Big Bang and religious teachings keeps showing just how little these 16 year olds seem to know about the evidence and arguments that support the scientific claims, as well as their general lack of understanding of the scientific method. I keep getting versions of “the Big Bang is just a theory, whereas [Insert Scripture X Here] is the infallible word of God”, as well as being told the Big Bang simply “can’t have happened” because “it’s impossible” whereas “we know” God has the power to create the world. The severe lack of consideration for the potential metaphorical and poetic role of scripture in telling the story of creation hints at a whole new generation of future fundamentalists looming on the horizon. And most of these kids have chosen to study at least one science next year for A-level!

And then there’s the question about human rights and religious teachings - would we need human rights laws if everyone just followed religious teachings? Well - a number of my students seem perfectly content to argue horrific versions of “of course [Religion X] doesn’t allow homosexuality but, other than LGBTQ people, everyone would be better off if we all just followed religious teachings” - as if LGBTQ+ people do not matter and can just be completely ignored in the equation. The more depressing students have further defended their person-disregarding thesis on some version of “homosexuality is unnatural anyway and if people followed religious teachings they would just be acting naturally and wouldn’t be homosexual anymore”.

Jesus - and I - wept!

I’m not expecting my students to all be enlightened atheists or LGBTQ+ supporting liberals like me, but I am at least expecting them to, at this stage in their education and maturity, be able to a) accept the reality of scientific consensus and recognise that there are many ways in which people happily reconcile their faith and the words of scripture with the agreed facts of the world and that if they do want to reject the science and argue for the primacy of scripture, taken completely literally, as the basis for their epistemology then they need to recognise the immensity and consequences of that decision and address, and at least attempt to defend, it; and b) recognise that whatever they may personally believe God thinks about the rightness or wrongness of certain sexualities, to deny any group of human beings the full spectrum of their universal human rights is abhorrent and as indefensible as any other such discrimination. Religion, as the walls of my classroom have always declared, is no excuse for homophobia. Even if you personally believe your faith advocates views which could be considered homophobic or prejudiced and you choose to hold those views, that belief does not entitle you to make someone who believes something different than you’s life miserable. And if you think your God will reward you for cruelty and violence inflicted on another human being because of their sexual or gender identity, in my opinion it’s time to start asking yourself how worthy of worship such a deity actually is? (Spoiler alert: if God is something that would be worthy of worship then, guess what - you probably got that nasty belief that They would want you to act with hostility and degradation to LGBTQ+ people utterly wrong, because it’s either completely out of character, or God is not who you say they are at all.)

The sheer omission of any attempt at justifying their disregard for LGBTQ+ people and/or all of known science in their writing is so depressing. Oh well - many, many more papers to go…