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So, I decided to get my hairs cut before the talk at the college yesterday. I called Phil and the best he could do was 2:30, with the talk at 3:30, but it was thought he could get me out in time if I skipped the blow-dry. I left at 1:45 (his shop is on the other side of town) but hit a major traffic snag, and ended up calling to cancel, and just noodled around. I still arrived at the classroom about 20 minutes early, so I paced around the hallways. There was one student who showed up early and asked "are you the Wicca lady?" and asked me a slew of questions like to we practice Voodoo, do we pray, who do we pray to, and do we have our own language (?). These were the sort of questions I expected, so I think I answered them handily. Then the rest of the class arrived, and the teacher maybe 2 minutes before class was supposed to start.
He said he was going to ask me some questions about our approach to why there were so many religions- and wanted to know if I was a pluralist, a universalist, or several other categories he'd listed, as this was something the students were going to be writing a paper on. It caught me off guard, and I had to think about it for a bit. But I ploughed on with my talk, which ran a little long but he gave me enough of a sense of the time that I was able to wrap it up in time for questions. There weren't any- this was pretty surprising. There were a few of the students who seemed really interested in what I was saying, but most of them appeared bored out of their skulls- at least one even fell asleep.
It gave me one of those 'you are not everyone' moments. If someone came to speak at my class about their beliefs and it was something I'd barely heard of, I'd have been fascinated. But apparently a lot of people just don't give a rat's ass about what I believe. I've noticed this before, actually, when people ask me if I feel 'persecuted' or if I've been getting grief from Christians about my religion- and my answer is a rather cheerful "I find that most people don't care!" so I suppose this is the other edge if that particular phenomenon. It's hard for me to wrap my head around, especially considering that these students chose to take this class in comparative religions, unless it's a required course (but it was pretty small).
Of course, the other possibility is that I was just boring, but I doubt that.
One student asked a question in the middle when I was talking about manipulative magic and if curses worked, and she was one of the interested ones. It gave me some things to think about, actually. The prof said he thought she was one of the ones who was interested in Wicca. Another came up and thanked me very politely and made a bit of a fuss over me; I couldn't tell if he was interested in Wicca or doing a "look at what an open-minded Christian I am" dance, but I appreciated it nevertheless. It might have been a reaction to the fact that one guy handed me my outline hand-out back while saying "I'm just going to throw this away so you can have it back" which seemed like an underhanded way of saying "I think what you believe is utter crap and don't want any association with it, and here's my way of letting you know" *shug* or the fact that 2 people in the class flat out refused to come, and had been excused and given extra assignments- apparently they felt like Jesus would get pissed off if they even listened to a Wiccan talk about her beliefs. That's really sad to think abut, actually.
The prof also had a friend of his audit the class, a Christian but an older guy (60-70s) and we three talked a bit after class. The prof tried to get me to nail down one of the big differences between Christians and Pagans as being the fact that Pagans think God is more 'complete' or otherwise better off for having created everything, while Christians think God would be just fine as is without having created anything. I had a hard time answering that because I'd never really thought about it that way, or heard of any Christians specifically talking about the other. He obviously has some kind of agenda to try to verify this theory of his, and his colleague said he will talk your ear off about it if you let him. Which I don't mind, and we actually stood by my car and gabbed for probably 10-15 minutes. He said he had another colleague who wanted me to give a talk for her class too, but she teaches English so I'm not sure what I'd be speaking to an English class about. Maybe she just wants to chat- that's fine too.
He said he was going to ask me some questions about our approach to why there were so many religions- and wanted to know if I was a pluralist, a universalist, or several other categories he'd listed, as this was something the students were going to be writing a paper on. It caught me off guard, and I had to think about it for a bit. But I ploughed on with my talk, which ran a little long but he gave me enough of a sense of the time that I was able to wrap it up in time for questions. There weren't any- this was pretty surprising. There were a few of the students who seemed really interested in what I was saying, but most of them appeared bored out of their skulls- at least one even fell asleep.
It gave me one of those 'you are not everyone' moments. If someone came to speak at my class about their beliefs and it was something I'd barely heard of, I'd have been fascinated. But apparently a lot of people just don't give a rat's ass about what I believe. I've noticed this before, actually, when people ask me if I feel 'persecuted' or if I've been getting grief from Christians about my religion- and my answer is a rather cheerful "I find that most people don't care!" so I suppose this is the other edge if that particular phenomenon. It's hard for me to wrap my head around, especially considering that these students chose to take this class in comparative religions, unless it's a required course (but it was pretty small).
Of course, the other possibility is that I was just boring, but I doubt that.
One student asked a question in the middle when I was talking about manipulative magic and if curses worked, and she was one of the interested ones. It gave me some things to think about, actually. The prof said he thought she was one of the ones who was interested in Wicca. Another came up and thanked me very politely and made a bit of a fuss over me; I couldn't tell if he was interested in Wicca or doing a "look at what an open-minded Christian I am" dance, but I appreciated it nevertheless. It might have been a reaction to the fact that one guy handed me my outline hand-out back while saying "I'm just going to throw this away so you can have it back" which seemed like an underhanded way of saying "I think what you believe is utter crap and don't want any association with it, and here's my way of letting you know" *shug* or the fact that 2 people in the class flat out refused to come, and had been excused and given extra assignments- apparently they felt like Jesus would get pissed off if they even listened to a Wiccan talk about her beliefs. That's really sad to think abut, actually.
The prof also had a friend of his audit the class, a Christian but an older guy (60-70s) and we three talked a bit after class. The prof tried to get me to nail down one of the big differences between Christians and Pagans as being the fact that Pagans think God is more 'complete' or otherwise better off for having created everything, while Christians think God would be just fine as is without having created anything. I had a hard time answering that because I'd never really thought about it that way, or heard of any Christians specifically talking about the other. He obviously has some kind of agenda to try to verify this theory of his, and his colleague said he will talk your ear off about it if you let him. Which I don't mind, and we actually stood by my car and gabbed for probably 10-15 minutes. He said he had another colleague who wanted me to give a talk for her class too, but she teaches English so I'm not sure what I'd be speaking to an English class about. Maybe she just wants to chat- that's fine too.
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Date: Jan. 26th, 2005 01:49 pm (UTC)From:At least the prof. and his friend were cool to ya.
Sheena