God and Research: Teaching #2

My friend David has a great blog ( http://dbjorn.blogspot.com) where he wrote a couple of weeks ago about a student with religious tendencies who wrote a paper condemning the use of alcohol, the irony being that he had just sat down at a restaurant with a glass of Chianti to do some grading. David’s post made me laugh in recognition, but it also got me to thinking about why students choose to use religion as a basis for argument.

Being an English teacher, I have read a lot of papers on a lot of different topics. Argumentative research papers are always the best because students don’t understand the concept of narrowing down to fit the page requirement; rather, they try to go as broad as possible so they have enough to write about in the vast expanse of Eight Whole Pages (never mind the double spacing). As a result, and before I came up with my “Banned Topics” list, I have read papers on how America is not a democracy (this one wasn’t too bad, actually), creation versus evolution (yawn), why pregnant women should not smoke (I tried to dissuade, I really did), and the existence of God (not just one, but literally about four or five over the years). The ones that have been the hardest to grade, though, have been the ones on, say, gay marriage or abortion, which base their arguments on religious beliefs.

It seems that the difficulty behind writing an argumentative paper based on religion gets down to the “it’s a free country” cliché: how can a person make a logical argument based around a philosophy that not only not everyone agrees with, but also that even within members of a particular religious community, gaps in belief still exist? I wouldn’t presume to speak for the entire teaching community, but I feel comfortable in saying that teachers generally discourage students from making logical arguments based on religious belief. There’s just too much gray area.

When I think about it, though, is it really wrong for a student to base an argument on religion? Take the gay marriage example. I believe that people who are against gay marriage are actually against homosexuality in general, and that idea comes from a religious belief. One cannot really argue with a person’s beliefs; generally, they are what they are, and if a person believes in her heart of hearts that homosexuality goes against the Will of God, who am I to tell her, no matter how much I might want to, how ridiculous that is? Religious beliefs are powerful, sometimes mystical forces that are difficult to refute and difficult to work with, because they work in absolutes. For the most staunch, things are as they are, period. Not a lot of wiggle room there.

The problem with that is that it doesn’t allow for the questioning, the thought processes, the turning over of an idea, examining it from all sides and all angles, because the results are always the same, and always focus on what God says.

The question, still, is if this is an ineffective way of approaching an argument in writing. Is it incorrect to argue that abortion should be outlawed because it is murdering a baby, and murdering babies goes against God’s will? Is it wrong to say that we should not be dabbling in cloning because we are playing God? Is there room for people to include their religious beliefs in a clear, well-thought-out and appropriate way? Or does religion create too much clarity, so much so that one can see no other way but The Way of God?