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because it doesn't provide a better place. It simply provides a different one, and you're verging on lording it over all us heathens with our allegedly filthy depraved lives etc etc*. I hope you realise that people can be moral and not christian? And as I said before, I find the claim that educational standards are higher in those places somewhat suspect.
*'course, my uni was a city campus and has almost no dorms at all, bar one block on one of the campuses which only finished construction a few months ago, but hey.
I dont understand how you can completely accept rules in a 'wellness' dorm, but not in a Christian school. They have the same intent. Unless the mere fact it is Christian is the problem for you, but then thats a completely different matter.
I do not NEED rules in a Christian school, they simply HELP me to live the way I want. Listen, I've gone to a secular college before (actually a CEGEP in Quebec) and there was plenty of stuff I wanted to avoid there. And being at the school I am now, I am. Also, I AM studying theology and my education is actually quite good for the size of my college.
What did you want to avoid, and do you expect future choices in regard to employment, place of residence, and general interaction with the rest of the world to be similarly guided by a desire to avoid the behaviors and persons that give you pause and surround yourself with like-minded individuals as thoroughly as possible?
What did you want to avoid, and do you expect future choices in regard to employment, place of residence, and general interaction with the rest of the world to be similarly guided by a desire to avoid the behaviors and persons that give you pause and surround yourself with like-minded individuals as thoroughly as possible?
No, but it helps when you are living with a hundred other people and focusing on studying theology.
What did you want to avoid, and do you expect future choices in regard to employment, place of residence, and general interaction with the rest of the world to be similarly guided by a desire to avoid the behaviors and persons that give you pause and surround yourself with like-minded individuals as thoroughly as possible?
No, but it helps when you are living with a hundred other people and focusing on studying theology.
I also wanted to know what it was that you'd previously encountered and subsequently wanted to avoid.
Yeah, it seems people have been coming down hard on me for things that I havn't even said. My main point was that school rules can be good for some people. Its also important to realize theres a whole range of schools between a secular school and BJU.
Yeah, it seems people have been coming down hard on me for things that I havn't even said. My main point was that school rules can be good for some people. Its also important to realize theres a whole range of schools between a secular school and BJU.
I went to some pains to point out the latter, thanks so much
All in the name of providing themselves and their family the same kind of bubble they spent so much time in.
I just enjoy this over-generalization too much... Weren't you just complaining about hyperboles like 3 paragraphs up?
Anyway, Hesthefastest, I just wanted to chime in and say that I think I understand where your coming from. I know a lot of people that end up going to Christian colleges, (not me, I gots no money) and it seems that a lot of them go in order to make sure that they can focus on a traditional education without having to worry about distractions from other students. They want the people that they live around and take classes with to share their common goals and ideals.
Probably the most important thing from my perspective is whether the person chose to go to that college or not. If they didn't choose the college for themselves, than obviously they won't fit in, they'll probably be like me and want to work around the rules at least to some extent. If they did choose to go there than it matters why. Did they want to go so that they would be with others like themselves or because their faith is so weak that they wouldn't last with any temptation whatsoever.
If your faith is so weak that you require being around other people just to maintain the guise of Christianity then you'd of course need to do some serious soul searching and look at what choices you've made and why. But then again, if your at BJU at least you have them as a resource at your disposal.
I personally have slight problems with some of the minor rules. I know they're there to help keep the focus on education, but some of them seem to rely on people having no self-control at all. (like the pants rule.) Then again, I know people that dress just like that without any outward provocation just because they like to be modestly dressed.
Banning sex drugs and alcohol is one thing- what I found bizarre was banning Halo and Neil Young, imposing a curfew (because you're letting the devil get to you if you miss the last bus back in time, 11:35 is the devil's hour) and inspecting rooms for tidyness.
I mean inspecting a fucking college dorm room for tidyness? If a kid cleans up against his will just to avoid getting hounded, how likely is he to reproduce this behavior when no one gives a flying fuck what his living space looks like?
Yeah, it seems people have been coming down hard on me for things that I havn't even said. My main point was that school rules can be good for some people. Its also important to realize theres a whole range of schools between a secular school and BJU.
Once again, I'm with you, assuming you made this choice autonomously (sounds like you did if you've been to a secular school and decided it's not for you).
Having been raised around a lot of the types of people who would and did go to Christian colleges and universities, including going to the same churches as them, I agree with Saggio completely. The part that really resonated with my own experiences was the end bit:
Well, when all you have within your ranks are spiritual children, the faith itself turns into a simplified caricature of itself. Instead of having congregants discuss the significance of the fabled Q-source and its implications for readings of the Gospels, or the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount in light of Augustine, you get 10-minute power point presentations or sermons on childish topics: like why it's immoral to read Harry Potter, or why Left Behind is an accurate portrayal of (a rather childish conception of) the end of days.
In short, those stupid, batshit rules do nothing but undermine a rich and historied faith, and lower the standards bar to such a level as to make it all meaningless.
Rather than have any rational discourse or reasoned debate, virtually everyone in these churches just wants to be told things they already believe anyway, albeit with new stories and perhaps a few different passages cited. Everyone is so sheltered from the outside world that they're constantly hypocritical and don't even notice it because they truly can't see the overarching connections to everything else.
The trouble with the beej and similar (note to the defensive among you: the following does not apply to all religious colleges, so shut the hell up) is that its not just the dorm code that's problematic; of far more concern is the constant spin put on the courses, the frequent outright misinformation, and of course, the near-to-complete absence of coverage on a number of topics, particularly human health and the natural sciences. Also of concern is the rigour of the academics at these places; ie, there isn't much.
This.
While I certainly would not have attended a Christian uni, I have less of a problem with the morality police mentality that can be prevalent at some of those institutions. After all, it is all about a community lifestyle focused on how a group of people wish to live their lives (no smoking, no drinking, no sex before marriage, etc.) If that is how they wish to live--in private, not pushing those "virtues" on the public--I'm not one to question that or say they are wrong. If we can agree on that issue, just, please... stay the hell off of my front porch. I'm not interested in a proselytizing sales pitch early Saturday afternoon when I'm trying to clean my damn house.
However, any student who makes the willful decision to attend a school where theology takes precedence over science and history is doing himself or herself a huge disservice. Any parent who is hell-bent on sending his or her child to an institution that fosters that type of academic (or lack thereof) setting is incredibly misguided and doing harm to that child. We have enough of an education problem in the United States. We really don't need any more adults who can quote scripture verbatim while believing the Great Flood made old rocks that way, Adam and Eve hung out with dinosaurs, and the speed of light decays.
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I personally have slight problems with some of the minor rules. I know they're there to help keep the focus on education, but some of them seem to rely on people having no self-control at all. (like the pants rule.) Then again, I know people that dress just like that without any outward provocation just because they like to be modestly dressed.
They either aren't or they are horribly myopic and poorly executed.
Example: Mandatory class attendance. It's a great thing until you accept that some students learn better from the book, or that some students won't be able to retain much of anything taught at 8 in the morning, or that the punishment is often counterproductive or discouraging to the education process (i.e. grades dropping only on account of missing classes, instead of on shoddy work or not knowing the material).
Then in addition to the dress code you brought up, you also have mandatory chapels, clean lifestyle restrictions, and curfews - regulations whose goal is essentially nothing more than giving the administration an unjustifiable level of control over its students.
So sure, a student can elect to go there and also to stay there, but it's laughable that a place like this exists on the tertiary level of education.
The problem with this logic is that the people attending such a school are those that need to be reminded of these rules and that the rules are expected to be enforced on a daily basis.
This is what I take issue with. If, as you say, the people who attend Universities such as BJU are those that fundamentally require the strict rules encompassing all sorts of things, including what sort of music or literature is allowed, so they may live up to the basic moral standards of the Christian faith, you have some problems. In my previous posts, I spoke about the importance of responsibility in terms of faith. Now, what you seem to advocating here is something that I absolutely railing against; the creation and fostering of spiritual children.
Now, ask yourself, who in society requires relatively strict, regimented social mores and laws to be imposed upon them? There are three possibilities: children, criminals, and those who lack the capacity for understanding which is required for responsibility. The last category can in some cases describe children and criminals; however, let us exclude them for the moment from this last category. We are left with people who suffer from some sort of mental illness, condition, or addiction (or perhaps a combination of all three) that makes it very hard to view them as one who view a typical, relatively healthy, adult who can follow and understand social mores and rules without issue.
Criminals in many cases may certainly understand the law and associated social norms, but for whatever reason, choose to willfully disobey and break the rules. I have no idea why many people do this, and for the purposes of this discussion it really doesn't matter. We can think of criminals as those who understand laws but break them anyway,
The last possibility are children. What is characteristic of a child? Well, they lack a full capacity for understanding, although there is most certainly some available, and it fluctuates by age. In many ways, a child is treated as a hybrid between the criminals and those without legitimate understanding: we still punish children if they break the rules, but we do not automatically assume that they know or understand the rules; indeed, in some cases, the punishment is used as a method by which to teach about the rule which was broken.
The way in which a person is treated when they break the moral rules at BJU is the same way in which people treat children. If a student willfully broke the rules while fully understanding them, they could be likened to a criminal; however, given the nature of the rules of BJU, and the assumption by you and I that the students choose of their own accord, there is a bit of self-filtering going on; a student who fully understands the rules of BJU but would willfully break them will likely not attend BJU in the first place. So, what we have left is two possibilities: either the rule breaker is like a child, or they just don't understand anything at all.
If the rule breaker doesn't understand anything at all, it would imply a number of things. First, understanding is a requisite in its own right for responsibility, which is a defining feature of a social and spiritual adult. If that's true, then the person who broke the rules, but lacked understanding, they cannot be considered an adult, nor can they even be held accountable for their actions. It's a non-play. It's why people who are considered legally insane cannot be charged with crimes, they lack responsibility, legal adulthood, because they lack true understanding. If BJU punished a student who lacked understanding, they would, in effect, but holding some who is fundamentally unable to be responsible, as responsible. It's a non-starter.
Now, I don't think BJU treats people like either of the above; if they do, it is only in special cases and certainly outside of the norm. They do, however, treat people the same way we treat children. Because BJU is an academic institution, there is an automatic assumption that the pupils going there possess mental faculties similar or comparable to those of a typical adult person. Along with that goes all the implications of being an adult. The instructors are not necessarily supposed to play the role of caregiver, as in elementary and high school, they are there to teach and pass on knowledge to other adults. The dynamic of the relationship rests upon the assumption that the people who are being taught hold the same or similar levels of responsibility, understanding, and autonomy as the instructor, all of whom are assumed to fit an arbitrary standard (everyone assumed to be above some age; in many cases this is implicit, as the general age in which people graduate high school is 18, which is also the age of majority in many countries, including mine).
When someone breaks a rule at BJU, the previous assumptions relating to the University being an academic institution are completely thrown out the window. The rule-breaker is assumed to have some level of understanding, but perhaps not a true understanding; moreover, punishment is not viewed like a "punishment," it would be considered a moment where the rule-breaker would learn the rule. That is not present in dealing with criminals - there is an automatic assumption that the criminal understands, in full, the actions that he or she took, and the rule he or she broke.
Those that make the choice (and I say choice because there are those who are probably forced by their parents to attend, which is a whole different matter) to attend BJU read those rules and understand them
The problem is that the rules are constructed in a very particular way. They are a certain type of rules that, given the characteristics and definitions of an adult, should not need to be espoused. By doing so, BJU is implicitly acknowledging that the people who actually go to their school cannot be considered an adult, spiritual or otherwise, and thus, cannot be held to the general standard that Christian adults everywhere are.
These rules do not rob any autonomy from these people as it was their choice to go to a school with such rules, and knew of them before they chose to attend.
First, I remain skeptical regarding the nature of the choice. In my previous posts I mentioned that I find decisions which lack all necessary knowledge or understanding to be quite dubious, and I hold to that.
However, leaving that aside, the point regarding autonomy has to be looked at from the point of view of the institution. Specifically, how the people interact with the institution and others within it. The people who choose to willfully give up their autonomy to attend a place like BJU can do just that, without any larger issue; the same thing happens when you enter seminary or the military. The way in which BJU treats those people, however, is in such a way as one would treat either children or those without their full mental faculties. It's a two-sided thing, and in this case, it's BJU that is negating any conception of adulthood on the part of the students by the way in which it chooses to interact with them.
The rules are not there to shape them into what the school deems is a "Christian", but rather they are there so that Christians can see the rules and find that this school fits the lifestyle they are choosing to live.
There are two things working against this. First, the nature of the rules and the way in which the institution uses them to interact with students (I have discussed this at length above). Second, there is a subtle but important difference between "values" and "rules." In many cases, the values of a certain social group are codified into rules, or laws. For instance, we generally don't accept murder as reasonable conduct - it violates our values. In addition to that, however, it violates rules which we have created which reflect those values. Not washing for an extended period of time is something that violates the values of our society. It is seen as impolite, and also the lack of hygiene reflects poorly on the person's character. There is not, however, a rule or a law that compels people to wash or maintain a minimum level of self-care.
In terms of the Christian church, there is certainly this dynamic too. There are certain values that are present within the community, such as love thy neighbour, and do unto others, which are not codified into rules, but remain incredibly important. The rules that exist within the Christian church are those that generally reflect those tenets, such as avoidance of sin (which itself is a rather curious way to codify rules). It is inconsistent with the values of the faith to be a raging douchebag to the guy who lives across the street from you, but if all you are doing is being a douchebag (without any specific, sinful action), there is no rule against that. If, however, in being a douchebag, you steal from him or murder him, then you break the rules which reflect the values of the community, and are punished accordingly.
What BJU does is take certain values (many of which I hold as utterly dubious; but that's a different issue), and turn them into explicit rules when it is not appropriate to do so. A value that many Christian communities hold is that it is considered good form to be modest; in speech, character, and in dress. What BJU has done is taken this value, and has codified it in such a way as to a) infantilize the people subject to it, and, b) make it inconsistent with other central values and tenets of the faith. Where does Christ say it is correct for women to wear skirts, while men wear pants? Neither Jesus or any of the Apostles wore pants, and Mary didn't wear anything like a modern skirt. Rags and robes, perhaps, but no pants, and no skirts. In fact, by imposing this arbitrary culture-specific standard (and making it out to be in the same league as no adultery, no stealing, etc) BJU is violating the central message of equality within the Christian faith.
If I, as a Christian, think that it is not right for someone to have sex before they are married, I do not want to get stuck in a room with someone who is committing that sin.
Unfortunately, it is every Christian's duty to go out into the world. You don't have to go down to the Piraeus, but you do have a duty as a Christian to a) spread the good news, and, b) actively fight against injustice in the social and civil square. Central tenets of the faith, and I still haven't heard a convincing argument why university students ought to be cloistered away from the world.
The idea that we should live without rules or laws is a ridiculous one.
I don't think I ever said anywhere that people should live without rules or laws. The particular ways in which BJU constructs its rules and laws have a literal metric fuckton of issues, and I am reasonably sure that I addressed most of my concerns within this post.
Anyway, I agree with anyone who says that this school shelters people from the outside world, because it pretty much does. Somehow I doubt that half the kids who go there go by choice.
Does anyone know how private schools like these are regulated? Do they go through the same process to get accredited as regular universities do?
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*'course, my uni was a city campus and has almost no dorms at all, bar one block on one of the campuses which only finished construction a few months ago, but hey.
I do not NEED rules in a Christian school, they simply HELP me to live the way I want. Listen, I've gone to a secular college before (actually a CEGEP in Quebec) and there was plenty of stuff I wanted to avoid there. And being at the school I am now, I am. Also, I AM studying theology and my education is actually quite good for the size of my college.
No, but it helps when you are living with a hundred other people and focusing on studying theology.
I also wanted to know what it was that you'd previously encountered and subsequently wanted to avoid.
I went to some pains to point out the latter, thanks so much
Anyway, Hesthefastest, I just wanted to chime in and say that I think I understand where your coming from. I know a lot of people that end up going to Christian colleges, (not me, I gots no money) and it seems that a lot of them go in order to make sure that they can focus on a traditional education without having to worry about distractions from other students. They want the people that they live around and take classes with to share their common goals and ideals.
Probably the most important thing from my perspective is whether the person chose to go to that college or not. If they didn't choose the college for themselves, than obviously they won't fit in, they'll probably be like me and want to work around the rules at least to some extent. If they did choose to go there than it matters why. Did they want to go so that they would be with others like themselves or because their faith is so weak that they wouldn't last with any temptation whatsoever.
If your faith is so weak that you require being around other people just to maintain the guise of Christianity then you'd of course need to do some serious soul searching and look at what choices you've made and why. But then again, if your at BJU at least you have them as a resource at your disposal.
I personally have slight problems with some of the minor rules. I know they're there to help keep the focus on education, but some of them seem to rely on people having no self-control at all. (like the pants rule.) Then again, I know people that dress just like that without any outward provocation just because they like to be modestly dressed.
I mean inspecting a fucking college dorm room for tidyness? If a kid cleans up against his will just to avoid getting hounded, how likely is he to reproduce this behavior when no one gives a flying fuck what his living space looks like?
I think most people here are basically objectiving because BJU's rules and educational goals are essentially identical to those in <a href="http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR01202">Saudi Arabia.</a>
Rather than have any rational discourse or reasoned debate, virtually everyone in these churches just wants to be told things they already believe anyway, albeit with new stories and perhaps a few different passages cited. Everyone is so sheltered from the outside world that they're constantly hypocritical and don't even notice it because they truly can't see the overarching connections to everything else.
This.
While I certainly would not have attended a Christian uni, I have less of a problem with the morality police mentality that can be prevalent at some of those institutions. After all, it is all about a community lifestyle focused on how a group of people wish to live their lives (no smoking, no drinking, no sex before marriage, etc.) If that is how they wish to live--in private, not pushing those "virtues" on the public--I'm not one to question that or say they are wrong. If we can agree on that issue, just, please... stay the hell off of my front porch. I'm not interested in a proselytizing sales pitch early Saturday afternoon when I'm trying to clean my damn house.
However, any student who makes the willful decision to attend a school where theology takes precedence over science and history is doing himself or herself a huge disservice. Any parent who is hell-bent on sending his or her child to an institution that fosters that type of academic (or lack thereof) setting is incredibly misguided and doing harm to that child. We have enough of an education problem in the United States. We really don't need any more adults who can quote scripture verbatim while believing the Great Flood made old rocks that way, Adam and Eve hung out with dinosaurs, and the speed of light decays.
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Example: Mandatory class attendance. It's a great thing until you accept that some students learn better from the book, or that some students won't be able to retain much of anything taught at 8 in the morning, or that the punishment is often counterproductive or discouraging to the education process (i.e. grades dropping only on account of missing classes, instead of on shoddy work or not knowing the material).
Then in addition to the dress code you brought up, you also have mandatory chapels, clean lifestyle restrictions, and curfews - regulations whose goal is essentially nothing more than giving the administration an unjustifiable level of control over its students.
So sure, a student can elect to go there and also to stay there, but it's laughable that a place like this exists on the tertiary level of education.
This is what I take issue with. If, as you say, the people who attend Universities such as BJU are those that fundamentally require the strict rules encompassing all sorts of things, including what sort of music or literature is allowed, so they may live up to the basic moral standards of the Christian faith, you have some problems. In my previous posts, I spoke about the importance of responsibility in terms of faith. Now, what you seem to advocating here is something that I absolutely railing against; the creation and fostering of spiritual children.
Now, ask yourself, who in society requires relatively strict, regimented social mores and laws to be imposed upon them? There are three possibilities: children, criminals, and those who lack the capacity for understanding which is required for responsibility. The last category can in some cases describe children and criminals; however, let us exclude them for the moment from this last category. We are left with people who suffer from some sort of mental illness, condition, or addiction (or perhaps a combination of all three) that makes it very hard to view them as one who view a typical, relatively healthy, adult who can follow and understand social mores and rules without issue.
Criminals in many cases may certainly understand the law and associated social norms, but for whatever reason, choose to willfully disobey and break the rules. I have no idea why many people do this, and for the purposes of this discussion it really doesn't matter. We can think of criminals as those who understand laws but break them anyway,
The last possibility are children. What is characteristic of a child? Well, they lack a full capacity for understanding, although there is most certainly some available, and it fluctuates by age. In many ways, a child is treated as a hybrid between the criminals and those without legitimate understanding: we still punish children if they break the rules, but we do not automatically assume that they know or understand the rules; indeed, in some cases, the punishment is used as a method by which to teach about the rule which was broken.
The way in which a person is treated when they break the moral rules at BJU is the same way in which people treat children. If a student willfully broke the rules while fully understanding them, they could be likened to a criminal; however, given the nature of the rules of BJU, and the assumption by you and I that the students choose of their own accord, there is a bit of self-filtering going on; a student who fully understands the rules of BJU but would willfully break them will likely not attend BJU in the first place. So, what we have left is two possibilities: either the rule breaker is like a child, or they just don't understand anything at all.
If the rule breaker doesn't understand anything at all, it would imply a number of things. First, understanding is a requisite in its own right for responsibility, which is a defining feature of a social and spiritual adult. If that's true, then the person who broke the rules, but lacked understanding, they cannot be considered an adult, nor can they even be held accountable for their actions. It's a non-play. It's why people who are considered legally insane cannot be charged with crimes, they lack responsibility, legal adulthood, because they lack true understanding. If BJU punished a student who lacked understanding, they would, in effect, but holding some who is fundamentally unable to be responsible, as responsible. It's a non-starter.
Now, I don't think BJU treats people like either of the above; if they do, it is only in special cases and certainly outside of the norm. They do, however, treat people the same way we treat children. Because BJU is an academic institution, there is an automatic assumption that the pupils going there possess mental faculties similar or comparable to those of a typical adult person. Along with that goes all the implications of being an adult. The instructors are not necessarily supposed to play the role of caregiver, as in elementary and high school, they are there to teach and pass on knowledge to other adults. The dynamic of the relationship rests upon the assumption that the people who are being taught hold the same or similar levels of responsibility, understanding, and autonomy as the instructor, all of whom are assumed to fit an arbitrary standard (everyone assumed to be above some age; in many cases this is implicit, as the general age in which people graduate high school is 18, which is also the age of majority in many countries, including mine).
When someone breaks a rule at BJU, the previous assumptions relating to the University being an academic institution are completely thrown out the window. The rule-breaker is assumed to have some level of understanding, but perhaps not a true understanding; moreover, punishment is not viewed like a "punishment," it would be considered a moment where the rule-breaker would learn the rule. That is not present in dealing with criminals - there is an automatic assumption that the criminal understands, in full, the actions that he or she took, and the rule he or she broke.
The problem is that the rules are constructed in a very particular way. They are a certain type of rules that, given the characteristics and definitions of an adult, should not need to be espoused. By doing so, BJU is implicitly acknowledging that the people who actually go to their school cannot be considered an adult, spiritual or otherwise, and thus, cannot be held to the general standard that Christian adults everywhere are.
First, I remain skeptical regarding the nature of the choice. In my previous posts I mentioned that I find decisions which lack all necessary knowledge or understanding to be quite dubious, and I hold to that.
However, leaving that aside, the point regarding autonomy has to be looked at from the point of view of the institution. Specifically, how the people interact with the institution and others within it. The people who choose to willfully give up their autonomy to attend a place like BJU can do just that, without any larger issue; the same thing happens when you enter seminary or the military. The way in which BJU treats those people, however, is in such a way as one would treat either children or those without their full mental faculties. It's a two-sided thing, and in this case, it's BJU that is negating any conception of adulthood on the part of the students by the way in which it chooses to interact with them.
There are two things working against this. First, the nature of the rules and the way in which the institution uses them to interact with students (I have discussed this at length above). Second, there is a subtle but important difference between "values" and "rules." In many cases, the values of a certain social group are codified into rules, or laws. For instance, we generally don't accept murder as reasonable conduct - it violates our values. In addition to that, however, it violates rules which we have created which reflect those values. Not washing for an extended period of time is something that violates the values of our society. It is seen as impolite, and also the lack of hygiene reflects poorly on the person's character. There is not, however, a rule or a law that compels people to wash or maintain a minimum level of self-care.
In terms of the Christian church, there is certainly this dynamic too. There are certain values that are present within the community, such as love thy neighbour, and do unto others, which are not codified into rules, but remain incredibly important. The rules that exist within the Christian church are those that generally reflect those tenets, such as avoidance of sin (which itself is a rather curious way to codify rules). It is inconsistent with the values of the faith to be a raging douchebag to the guy who lives across the street from you, but if all you are doing is being a douchebag (without any specific, sinful action), there is no rule against that. If, however, in being a douchebag, you steal from him or murder him, then you break the rules which reflect the values of the community, and are punished accordingly.
What BJU does is take certain values (many of which I hold as utterly dubious; but that's a different issue), and turn them into explicit rules when it is not appropriate to do so. A value that many Christian communities hold is that it is considered good form to be modest; in speech, character, and in dress. What BJU has done is taken this value, and has codified it in such a way as to a) infantilize the people subject to it, and, b) make it inconsistent with other central values and tenets of the faith. Where does Christ say it is correct for women to wear skirts, while men wear pants? Neither Jesus or any of the Apostles wore pants, and Mary didn't wear anything like a modern skirt. Rags and robes, perhaps, but no pants, and no skirts. In fact, by imposing this arbitrary culture-specific standard (and making it out to be in the same league as no adultery, no stealing, etc) BJU is violating the central message of equality within the Christian faith.
Unfortunately, it is every Christian's duty to go out into the world. You don't have to go down to the Piraeus, but you do have a duty as a Christian to a) spread the good news, and, b) actively fight against injustice in the social and civil square. Central tenets of the faith, and I still haven't heard a convincing argument why university students ought to be cloistered away from the world.
I don't think I ever said anywhere that people should live without rules or laws. The particular ways in which BJU constructs its rules and laws have a literal metric fuckton of issues, and I am reasonably sure that I addressed most of my concerns within this post.
There you go.
Anyway, I agree with anyone who says that this school shelters people from the outside world, because it pretty much does. Somehow I doubt that half the kids who go there go by choice.
Does anyone know how private schools like these are regulated? Do they go through the same process to get accredited as regular universities do?
You don't have to read it. I'm just trying to answer to what ArcSyn put forward, and I can't do that in one liners.
There's that BJU education talking!
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know it's counter-productive. I couldn't resist.
You know what would help your resistance;
absolute control of your life by your university.
Also ritalin.
"you can't have sex with other dudes. It is hells of frowned upon."
which would be lame.