Today is Friday and we are on campus working on the second edition of our blogs. The students just looked at me blankly--and then excitedly-- because I told them they can write ANYTHING THEY WANT in their blogs for the first 15 minutes of the session. Afterward we will write about the Holocaust and the book "Night", which we have been reading for the past week. I am interested in reading their personal opinions on the book, which is very difficult language for them to take on, and also has many gruesome details of life in Auschwitz.
This week "Night" spurred what I think is the most interesting converation I have ever heard in one of my classes. In the book Elie describes how he saw children being burned in a crematory made just for them, while their parents burned in one just a few yards away. He saw his father being beaten, men being randomly shot and hundreds of prisoners being starved nearly to death. Elie, who had an unusual faith in god and spirituality as a young child, of course, begins to question God. Why, he asks, if God is almighty, did he let this happen?
Two students, Omar and Zebiba, who are Muslim, said they believed that God allows things like the Holocaust to happen because he is testing the faith and love of the people. Zebiba said that in her country, Ethiopia, there are often droughts that kill the crops and "make the people and animals suffer." This happens, she said, so that the people can prove their will to live and their faith in God.
Genarina, who is from the Dominican Republic and was raised Catholic, spoke quietly back to them. God is a not "some man" who can give and take away, she said. "God is an energry that is in between all of us." It is up to us as humans to use that energy for good or bad, she said. Genarina said that she stopped practicing Catholicism about seven years ago when she learned to believe in "the spirit".
In response, Jorge asked "Did man create God, or did God create man?" We don't really know waht is true about religion, he said.
Omar responded, "Of course God created man."
I asked Jorge if he lived basically by the ten commandments. "Do you steal, murder, have affairs with married women?" He said no, and I suggested that maybe it doesn't matter who created who because he was living by the rules of the Bible either way. I asked the class, "Was religion created simply to give us humans rules to live by?"
"There is no God," responded Shelly, who is from China and was not raised in an organized religion. "Man makes things happen. We cannot wait for God to do things."
Shocked, Lilian, who is from the Dominican Republic and was raised Catholic, said "I have never heard anyone say that. How can you say that?"
Esthefany said she has been questioning a lot lately why God can make bad things happen to good people. She said she has not lost her faith that there is a God, but she didn't understand why he could allow destruction. And she asked me what I thought. I told her I didn't have the answer, and that scholars have been trying to answer that question for generations. I said my personal belief is that if there were no bad, we wouldn't understand good and vice versa. I drew them a Yin Yang symbol to show what I meant.
The one thing we all agreed on is that this classroom allowed us to see and respect that each person has their own beliefs about religion and God, and we can only learn from each of them.
I love this questioning class.
