 So you want to have a discussion in your pairs about whether you think this is a religious thing or a non-religious thing. All cards placed okay now I'm gonna read through where your classmates have positioned their card. I'm sure at some point you're gonna feel the urge to want to contest maybe. Under the religion column we have believing in a higher being or power, having faith, every living thing has a spirit for example trees, nature and so on forth. Thunder happens when Zeus is angry, the Sun God, doing bad things you won't get into heaven, no belief in God. Oops I did that twice and you both put it in the same column that's that's great. All right no belief in God. So those are under the concept of religion. Let's go on to non-religion. Science gives us the answers in life. Big bang created earth and therefore us. Humans evolved from apes. Those are non-religion statements and over here in the question mark we have the church of the flying spaghetti monster also known as pastafarians and heaven is in the soul of my favorite shoe. Do we think at this time there's any of them that are placed in one category or another that shouldn't be there? We've got we've got a few already. All right so do you want to have a quick think about it guys those of you who are not really sure do you want to just dive in just go for it all right let's do it. Okay Bonnie you had your hand up. Which one do you think? I don't think that having faith should be placed under religion because having faith doesn't actually specify it's a religious faith. I can have faith in Sarah that she will do well. It's not really clear that it's religion related it's just people have implied that it's religion related. Okay when I was little I had faith in Santa. Santa. Like what you were saying like you can have faith in like Santa or someone like that and you don't like worship Santa or like Santa isn't a religion it's just a thing you have faith in because you're told that's right so I believe yeah that's why it's not kind of central to religion you can really have faith in anything. The fact of having faith it has to kind of come from somewhere because how do you just instinctively know that believing or having faith in something is an actual thing to you how do you know that you actually believe in it does it is it derived from someone else like like the Bible is that why people have belief in God or is it something within yourself or anything like that like where does it come from in whole. Faith doesn't necessarily have to be in a higher power so the faith could be either religion or non-religion you can have faith in a person as in you just trust their ability to do things and you could have faith in the high power which is a religion so it could be either depending on which way you are from. And what type of person you are because if you're a religious person like what you were saying before then you'll associate faith with your religion but if you're non-religious you'll associate it with more trust and other people. So do we want to move faith out of the religion side. Can we put it in the middle? Yeah I'm putting the question on because you can contest it either way. Okay so it goes in the question mark and the original placers what do you guys think how does that have you do because you had mentioned that you wanted to maybe place it in the question mark but you had kind of gone with this. Is what everyone else saying aligning with what you were trying to articulate. Yeah all right do you guys want to move it into the question mark then. All right Jake what do you think. There's the flying spaghetti monster one over there which you know some people could believe in it it could seem ridiculous but some people could believe in that honestly and first to like place that in a position you have to define what a religion is and the general form is religion is a guideline or something you believe in and you live by that and the flying spaghetti monster I guess some people live by that so it could be a religion it's a set of beliefs that they followed throughout their life. Yeah because I think that's the flying spaghetti monster is as valid as God and any other higher belief because there's no proof of it and yet it's still I'm still classed if you believe in it there's the same category as God and other religions. The thing about that one is it was created as a mock religion by non-religious people so they don't actually believe it they're just trying to comment on religion so if they if there are people that believe in it I doubt that but it's a way to set our religion because they don't actually believe that. It was created for that reason to mock religion like those other religions like last Thursdays and then all that stuff. So what makes Jedi is a religion and that not? No but like the point of the reason why I was created is to show you that no matter what you believe in it's all just a belief so it should be treated equally not necessarily one's more important than the other because they're all belief systems so it should be weighed the same. I feel it's a different way I feel it's like degrading it not helping it to make it all equal it's just making it sound stupid. So let's move past the church the flying spaghetti monster and if we want we can always come back to it but I do want us to get to a little bit of a discussion when we discuss your questions okay. Under non-religion we have things that pertain to what what what do you see a commonality theme is amongst the stuff under the non-religion? Science. The people have faith in science. What does non-religion speak? Also with science it says that we say that just because we cannot we have not proved it and it's true it's kind of like a religion aspect. So like with science like you know how like you cannot prove something so we cannot prove that there is no aliens therefore then there is a possibility of intelligent life. With the religion we cannot prove that there is no God therefore there is a possibility of God kind of thing. Saying there's a possibility of God is different to saying there is God and this is what he says. We're not arguing that there isn't the possibility of God we just say we can't say it and you can't like there's a there wasn't there a fallacy about you can't Ignorance? Ignorance? Yeah like appeal to ignorance there's not it's not there therefore it is you can't prove it that it's there therefore it is. There's a lack of evidence for something. God doesn't exist therefore God does exist. I think going off the proof thing that I think the people's belief in a God or a religion kind of automatically proves it's existence like not physical existence but I think more of a mental existence and how it gives hope and faith. I think like science you act believe in science like you believe there's a big theory in like that humans evolved from A to B. You don't really like worship it because you might not be evidence there you've got the proof so and there's no like guarantee that you're going to go somewhere after you live your physical life therefore there's no point in worshiping and I think that's why it's not a religion because like all the religions like Christianity Colossus and all that like they worship their God because they believe they're going somewhere after their life. I think we need to establish what is a religion because we haven't really there's no real definition of what actually is a religion is it that if you have a religion you have to worship something or if you have a religion it's belief or it's faith but I'm going to establish what actually is religion because that's all the argument about that spaghetti. So we need to establish what is a religion. I think we were saying before that having faith and belief is what a religion thrives on and if there's not that faith and belief then it kind of goes dormant I guess. So religion relies on people like science relies on more factual evidence kind of things. I feel like you guys are moving towards the purpose of religion right or where it has its foundation or why we have it. We want to figure out some of the criteria for religion in order to be able to determine then we can talk about the role that religion plays okay and that was I think what Lindsay was constantly going back to okay. I'm going to stop us somewhere around there. So I've added from what I was listening to in your discussions I've added that and correct me if I'm wrong but you agree that we don't need proof for religion like a hard proof and maybe that's something that makes religion different from science. So some of the things what we've come up with is faith belief worship and no need for proof. Is there any other criteria that you think needs to be up there in order for us to define a religion? Okay Felicity. So with the worship I think you don't need to just worship the religion itself you need to worship the higher power that is dictating that religion and your beliefs. So should we add a higher power or a God? Can we use the term God loosely and everyone knows that it's some sort of higher power we're not defining it. We could continue talking about these and keep going deeper and deeper and figuring out how one criteria that we might have thought we don't actually think it actually applies to all ideas of a religion and then so then we have to try and reevaluate we can keep going with that and it's by all means we'll do that over the course of this unit but what I would like for somebody to do for us is to help summarize what you think we've accomplished today through our discussion. So what is what is even if it's just one thing that you've taken away I want you guys to reflect a little bit on the discussion that we've had today you can talk about the activity you can talk about something somebody said but I want somebody to try and give us a little bit of a summary. Good so we've figured out some things but you're not saying that we figured out all things. I think that we kind of like disregarded what the world says about religion what like religions are and what type of religions there are we've actually like created a category for like what is a religion and what we can fit under the category of religion. Anybody else want to? You also have this idea that religion is more intrapersonal like it's not a constant throughout the universe it's within our brains and so. Any last final remarks? No? Alright. You guys have come up with some really great questions we are going to take some of these questions and we're going to build it into part of our discussion for next while I'll see you guys tomorrow so tomorrow's class but these are your questions. I've just kind of taken some of your statements and actually turned them into questions but this is what you guys came up with and these are some of our criteria that we've come up with. Good well thank you guys and I hope we've come to some sort of a little bit more clarity on this. Did you guys feel the conversation going a little bit deeper when we got going? Was it a tangible thing that you could feel? Sorry about that.