Posted on 03/21/2013 1:01:26 PM PDT by massmike
A Florida Atlantic University student said he was punished after he refused a professor’s directive to stomp on a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” written on it. The university, meanwhile, is defending the assignment as a lesson in debate.
“I’m not going to be sitting in a class having my religious rights desecrated,” student Ryan Rotela told television station WPEC. “I truly see this as I’m being punished.”
Rotela, who is a devout Mormon, said the instructor in his Intercultural Communications class told the students to write the name “Jesus” on a sheet of paper. Then, they were told to put the paper on the floor.
“He had us all stand up and he said ‘Stomp on it,’” Rotela said. “I picked up the paper from the floor and put it right back on the table.
The young college student told the instructor, Deandre Poole, that the assignment was insulting and offensive. “I said to the professor, ‘With all due respect to your authority as a professor, I do not believe what you told us to do was appropriate,’” Rotela said. ‘I believe it was unprofessional and I was deeply offended by what you told me to do.’”
Rotela took his concerns to Poole’s supervisor – where he was promptly suspended from the class.
Poole did not return calls seeking comment. According to his university profile, he has a PhD from Howard University and is authoring a book titled, “Obamamania: The Rise of a Mythical Hero.”
The university did not explain why students were only instructed to write the name of Jesus – and not the name of Mohammed or another religious figure.
(Excerpt) Read more at radio.foxnews.com ...
I was just going to make that same comment. Did all the others go along with the instructions without reservation, I wonder.
THANK YOU
“Are you a Christian?”
Yup. Did you bother to read the story before joining the mob, and then questioning someone’s salvation?
I am in no way questioning someone’s salvation. I just like to know someone’s point of view before discussing stories with them. Obviously if someone is a Christian I will approach them differently than if they are an atheist.
And I have read the story on several different sites because I was looking for the “professor’s” response but have yet to find one.
I would hope that I would never go along with stomping on Jesus’ name, no matter the reason.
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Sorry for my response then. I figured it was someone knee-jerking, so I knee-jerked. We do need the Professor’s side. The “lesson” itself does not demand that anyone be forced to stomp on it, and their not-stomping is part of the lesson. It’s a stupid lesson in and of itself, but far different than someone claiming they were being forced to stomp on Jesus and got suspended for it. We don’t know all the details though, but the story itself is fishy, even though it fits what we’d expect a college to do.
I thought I recalled something like that in Japan, don’t know if it’s true.
from wiki:
“The Japanese government used fumi-e to reveal practicing Catholics and sympathizers.[6] Fumi-e were pictures of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Government officials made everybody trample on these pictures. People reluctant to step on the pictures were identified as Catholics and were sent to Nagasaki. The policy of the Edo government was to turn them from their faith, Catholicism; however, if the Catholics refused to change their religion, they were tortured. As many of them still refused to abandon their faith, they were killed by the government. Executions sometimes took place at Nagasaki’s Mount Unzen, where some were dumped into the volcano.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumi-e
The call outs to ‘That Hideous Strength’ are spot on.
Freegards
Is this the deepest intellectual depth the university can muster?
It sounds like a preschool activity.
People should realize Christians are not equal citizens of this country. Expecting to be will make you very disappointed.
A smug one. Your posts read as though you view yourself intellectually superior to every other poster. Good luck with all that.
Stomp Jesus FAU professor is a Dem. Party official
Palm Beach County Democratic Executive Committee Contact Information
Dr. Deandre Poole, Vice Chair
2352 Z Ter Apt A, Riviera Beach, FL 33404
http://www.pbcdemocraticparty.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=366&Itemid=676
Thanks massmike.
You’re welcome.
If you’re referring to that one post where I thought I was having my Christianity insulted for not having the same view as everyone else on this, I apologized to the poster for jumping to that conclusion.
I am wondering if this student was the only one who refused to do this?
If that is so, I am more bothered by all the other students who participated in this insidious assignment.
And people say the rise of Nazi Germany could not happen to America? I am afraid its already started.
Another reason to homeschool...and go galt to defund the education racket.
He should have written “obama” on the paper and stomped on it.
A couple of decades ago a Japanese teacher got into a great deal of trouble in a history class for asking his students to do this “step on Christ” exercise as a learning lesson. The largely secular and definitely non-Christian authorities in Japan understood what was wrong with that and my recollection is they did the right thing to stop it from happening again. PING to americanintokyo — do you remember the details on that case?
Something is very seriously wrong if Japan did the right thing but a state university in Florida lets the professor get away with this.
I am neither a Roman Catholic nor a Mormon, and my Calvinist theology not only teaches me to oppose images of Christ but actually to destroy them as idols. If Yale or Harvard or some other private school wants to do something like this, that's up to them. But there is no way in the world I am going to say that a professor at a public university in the United States has the right to force students to step on words, images, or anything else representing Jesus Christ.
We have the First Amendment for a reason.
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