When I was in 9th grade, I had to write a weekly response paper for the “religion” class. I thought that since it’s a “religion” class and not a must-become-catholic class, we didn’t need to always say something positive about that particular religion.

Anyways, around that time, this Japanese religious group decided that “ill-behaved” people should be punished, so they poured “sarin” on trains and several people died from it. The leader of that group got arrested eventually and now he’s going through the trial.
So, I made this argument in my paper that maybe believing every single detail in the Bible wasn’t such a good idea because who knows what really happened thoughsands of years ago? Maybe for some people back then, the Christianity looked like a fearful, strange group just like that Japanese religious group for us. My main point was that maybe what’s important for us is to look at the concepts behind the stories and to be critical about them, which I thought was a pretty compromising, non-offensive way of ending my essay; however, my teacher, who was super catholic, didn’t think so. She was more than furious and wrote me a comment, basically saying “what’s wrong with you?!”

I got a C in that class but that was the only class in high school where I felt proud of my grade.