Taking Religious Studies at SFU

During this past Spring semester I enrolled in Introduction to Religious Studies at SFU, where I am still attending. I thought, "hey, I liked Comparative Civilizations in high school, and this is kinda like that. I like studying religion, although I never really studied it to be honest. I will like this course". Well, it was pretty much what I expected. It was very intro, and very basic - the textbook basically covered world religions and that was what consisted of the distance ed course. Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Judaism, Islam...yeah. As part of the curriculum we were also required to read Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. It's actually still sitting on my book shelf.

With distance ed courses and really long, boring texts, it's really rather difficult for me to wrap my head around them at home as I get distracted quite easily. So obviously despite my attempts to finish all the readings for all 12 weeks, by the end of the semester I had successfully read the first 4 weeks of readings, excluding the novel (which I had read the first 8 pages of out of 400).

By the time exam week rolled around, I had no intention whatsoever to finish those readings. I mean, who didn't know bits here and there about Moses? Karma? The chapter on Shinto was fairly short though just as detailed - but growing up in Japan proved the time spent reading that portion of the text was a waste as it was all everything I knew already anyway. As I figured the primary interpretation of the various world religions were generally all the same, I turned to the one source of information I turn to with a thirst for knowledge - Wikipedia. Profs will tell you and me all the time that Wikipedia is in fact not a reliable source of scholastic information - or information in general, for that matter. But I took my chances and studied for my exam via the site. It was pretty helpful, I must say, though I obviously wouldn't recommend this studying this way for obvious reasons.

With the 2 papers we had to write and the online discussion we had to take part in, I walked away from the class with an A-. I know I shouldn't be proud of this but it did make me pretty happy, as half way through the course I had realized that I was taking an elective I did not need (I miscalculated the amount of credits) thus piling on more readings and papers and exams for myself. The GPA boost did nothing.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how I bypassed the question regarding the novel I didn't quite finish in the exam, make Google (GOOGLE, not like that piece of shit HotBot) your friend if not already (and if even possible) - it works luxurious wonders.