Marilynne Robinson’s article was long however, it had some insightful thoughts about representing belief. I like when she discussed how everything she took from her studies whether it be subjects taken from anthropology to economics did not comply with how she made sense of the world around her. There are a lot of times in lectures and such, especially in high school, where lessons taught did not hit home or send mixed messages. For example, in health class in high school, we had a guest speaker. We had a local police officer come in and talk to the class about drinking. He asked the students why it was so bad to drink. Students responded with: because you do stupid things, because someone can get hurt, because it’s against the law, and the classic, I don’t know, I don’t really care… it’s fun! For me however, it was much more than that. I knew that alcohol was not made for the bellies of man but rather for cleaning and healing of wounds. I knew that alcohol was an addicting substance and when one is addicting, one’s free agency is virtually gone because one can make their choices. I knew that alcohol was not part of a healthy lifestyle and against the Word of Wisdom. All these things I would have loved to say that day however, I knew that my classmates would not have understood what I was saying.
What I am trying to say is that much of what I learn through secular lenses often are not absorbed and misunderstood by me, and if that’s the case for me, I’m sure the same for others and as such beliefs should be represented, whether secularly for those who don’t associate with religious means or spiritually for those that do. By keeping that in mind that everyone has different beliefs we can engage belief in a respectful way. We can introduce ideas and thus people can think about those ideas and construct, carve, and complete their beliefs (this is starting to sound more and more like inception, but I assure that that’s not where I am going).
So it is that introducing ideas/beliefs should be encouraged. However, forcing ideas/beliefs should be avoided. In the “Meet Your Farmer” films, we were able to look at what it’s like to have the lifestyle of a farmer, family life, struggles, etc. By exposing us to that we were able to form a simple belief about farmers, such as the belief that farmers work. Marilynne said that we can know about characters and know characters. I think the farmer videos allowed for the getting to know of the characters and thus creating a personal connection to them and therefore, creating beliefs about them. Belief is all around us and we have to attentive to how we share those beliefs, how we represent them, and how not to force them down people’s throats.
I sometimes have a hard time separating things that non-religious people might not have grown up learning and the things that I, as a Mormon, have grown up learning. I think it is for this reason that I, too, misunderstand some secular ideas. Not to bash on BYU, because it's a good place, but I think that being at BYU makes this even harder because everyone believes the same things. I think it's important to experience the real world and be exposed to other opinions and ideas so that we can also, like you said, construct and complete our own beliefs.
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