Educational Beliefs

Hi all,

Feeling the urge to take a break from emulating the ARM processor in the C programming language (I shit you not), I thought I'd share with you a few of my experiences of religious groups and Theology in general since the start of University. It's about time, right?

Needless to say, it's apparent that the majority of people at Bristol are either Agnostic or Atheist. Which felt kind of strange at first, after being around Catholics, Fundamental Christians and Muslims throughout my previous years. However, by no means have I escaped the aura of preachers and religious spokespeople. At the beginning of this term, the Christian Union held what I can only describe as a 'campaign' entitled "Dare to Believe", and organised a series of talks with somewhat questionable titles including "Do Atheists make good scientists?" - I mean, they were obviously going for the shock approach to get more people to attend the events. I wish I could have gone to one, but I do have an awesome set of flatmates, so I weighed up my options. I spoke to a guy on my course who attended the talk (also an Atheist from a religious school), and he said he was literally "shaking with rage" at what the speaker was saying.

On the one hand, I suppose I feel more comfortable in talking about my own beliefs openly, but I still can't help but feel so incredibly interested to hear what the religious people have to say. I guess it's because I can relate to them by comparing my experiences, coming from a religious school. When you're surrounded by people who (to you at least) are completely bonkers in how they view the origin of life, you're entitled to defend your opinion. I respect that.

One of the main things I've noticed about University is about how it seems to have filtered out the true believers and non-believers, as people tend to make up their own mind once free from the views administered by the family. I've noticed a few of my friends changing 'their views' from Catholic to Agnostic, but nobody the other way around. Of course, it makes me happy knowing they're finally making up their own minds about their religion and breaking themselves away from the confinement of it.

I guess I could say that I'm more passive about religion than I used to be. Then again, I haven't really come into contact with religious people in Bristol anywhere the scale of what I've experienced in East London. I still hold the same views though, on the whole.

Also, many thanks to Henry Murray and Sophie Valentine for the image up top :)

Until next time.