The key topic for this section of our junior faith course is Challenges to faith. In this section we looked at three different major examples of challenges to faith. We looked at atheism and the key idea of questioning if God exists, as well as looking at what philosophers have said about the topic. We talked about science being a challenge to faith, and the relationship between science and religion. The last thing we looked at in this topic was the thought of dehumanization through the examples of two different movies.
One of the ideas that I want to remember from this section is the movie based on advertising with John Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh looks through the American culture and tries to answer the question of "who really forms us?" Kavanaugh believes that the media "informs and forms us," and that "whoever gives us information about our world actually forms our own notions about what is most real." Kavanaugh believes that the advertising that we watch every day on T.V. and other places has come to be what is most real in our lives.
The second thing that I would like to remember about this section is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a German philosopher who is strongly associated with Nihilism. He did not believe that any reason is capable of discovering truth. Nietzsche is famous for a quote in which he said "God is dead." In this quote Nietzsche was trying to illustrate that the belief in God was finally dieing out. Nietzsche's arguments seem very reasonable to many people, and even goes as far to say that there is no real right and wrong.
The third thing I would like to remember about the fifth section of the theology course is the movie on the merchants of cool. In this movie they attempt to explain the loop in which our society is formed. They bring up the question as to do we form society, or does society form us? In the movie they say that there is a loop. In this loop the media markets what they see society doing, and in turn society copies what they see the media illustrating. It is a never-ending loop of copying, and society is truly formed by the media in some ways.
In this section we see many challenges to faith. I think that the greatest challenge to faith as a junior in SLUH is the feeling of materialism. I think that we are very materialistic in terms of Hobbes idea of materialism. Our school does not really look past the physical world. We try to, and set our goal to be to look past the physical world and become closer to God, but I think that we do not do a very good job because we are too focused on grades and schoolwork. We try to take time out of our day to stop the busy work, but I do not think this does what we are trying to accomplish any justice. I think that we are extremely materialistic because we are always so busy with the physical work instead of the spiritual work.