Since it filled as soon as registration was opened, you probably wouldn’t have gotten in anyway, and there was likely a line of hopefuls at the professor’s office trying to get permission to be added, too. 
Though how do you trust if you don’t find the case for trust convincing?
What came to mind as I pondered this comes from a modern liturgy that IIRC is common to Lutherans and Catholics:
Alleluia!
Lord, to whom shall we go;
You have the words of eternal life.
Alleluia, alleluia!
I tried to find a video with this being sung, to no avail. It expresses where I often find myself ending up: not finding anything at all convincing, not even finding anything attractive, but in a mood something not unlike despair seeing that there just aren’t any other viable options and the only course forward is surrender.
I like that, not ‘mere profession’ and consent to doctrine, not that doctrine is the dirty word some color it. How about a desire to trust even if not actually trusting, recognizing anxiety in ourselves, unworthy of our profession?
I fully agree. Belief in God is not mere intellectual assent, but a reorientation of the disposition of a person’s heart. “heart” as Bible writers use it is a metaphor for the unity of the self at the deepest level.
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This is something I have had trouble getting across to atheists: most of my science professors were Christians, and they all went into science out of a passion for Christ and for “thinking God’s thoughts after Him”. Atheists seem to have trouble of conceiving that studying science will not always rule out God but in fact can result in knowing Him better. They seem to think that the “God of the gaps” is the only God possible, and can’t grasp “the God of each moment” where there are no gaps and that encountering an apparent gap does not drive one to abandon the search and declare “God did it” but rather can – and often does – drive one to say, “Okay, God, how did You do that?” and jump the more heavily into science. I think my love of science that led me to take every science course I could in university came to a large extent from delighting in discoveries about the universe that would have been substantially less if I hadn’t viewed it as God’s universe.
An Orthodox (Antiochene, IIRC) lecturer mentioned this in an on-line video, that it is the burden of the church to teach bishops and theologians (though an Orthodox bishop is required to be a theologian, there are Orthodox theologians who are not bishops) to understand theology in the ancient languages and the contexts in which that theology was worked out, in order that the bishops might expound that theology in terms the people can understand. The theology of the church is indeed “written down precisely once and for all” but it is the task of each generation to grasp that theology on its terms that they might propound it to people today in their terms.
Making it clear is a twofold task, then: those who are to teach must understand the ancient sources clearly, and in turn make it clear to their generation. But it is also a twofold task in another way; it must be made clear to those in the church, which is far easier because those in the church are generally willing to listen and learn, but it must also be made clear to those outside the church – and that is a whole different matter!
Yet the Orthodox ultimately awards the accolade “Theologian” to those who can do all of the above and in so doing always maintain the focus on Christ. Indeed to the Orthodox much of what western Christians argue about doesn’t even qualify as theology because it isn’t talking about Jesus.
My science professors at university were also Christians. In fact, the college I attended was a private Christian school, but really only in name since its Presbyterian roots had been greatly diluted over the years. A decade or so before I attended, students were still required to attend chapel once a week. However, when I attended we were only required to attend one religious studies class (New Testament for me), and it was quite liberal in its curriculum. I also grew up in a religious household (non-denominational Protestant). Perhaps this is why I never thought science ruled out God, even as an atheist.
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I stand with James T. Kirk: there is no “no-win” scenario: You don’t make that choice; instead, you stop the trolley!
But the real lesson of such artificial conundra for Christians is that there are times, even many times, when the only choice is not whether or not to sin but which sin to choose! Such things remind me of when I was working at a church in Miami and was on time off and sitting at the pit where a large pig was being slowly roasted for Christmas. Since I was among Cubans I was doing what the Cubans did, tossing down holiday snacks followed by the occasional shot of rum, watching the pig slowly rotate and occasionally stepping up to pour a glass of wine and pour some of it on the pig, so I was hardly fit to do much more than sit at the table and chat with everyone.
Then came a phone call: a family in the church faced an emergency and they had called for the priest/pastor, but he was two and a half miles away, and I was “on deck” in case of a need from someone in the church, and I was being ordered to handle this.
So I could sin by refusing on grounds that I wasn’t fit to drive and thus leaving the family in the lurch, or I could get myself over to the family and sin by driving more than moderately inebriated – there was no one “in the hole” for me to pass this to.
That’s a pretty rare sort of situation, but it illustrates the point.
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That seems like it might be a case of mercy trumps law?
It’s a sin to lie… in most instances. There are times when it is legitimate to lie for mercy’s sake. If a Nazi SS trooper shows up at the door and asks if you are hiding any Jews, and you are, of course you say “I certainly am and I will lead you right to them”? Hopefully they’re well hidden and you can say “You may look for yourself.” Of course that wouldn’t be a lie phrased that way, just don’t slip at preface your reply with “No, …” 
But if you did ‘slip’, you certainly need not obsess about having sinned, nor would you have any sin to confess.
I met a Marine once who had been in the grenade situation. I learned about it one evening when we are all somewhere beyond happy but not yet drunk and he was lamenting the fact that phone books were disappearing from society. He and his team were in some sort of office building and he was checking out the room when the front window shattered as something flew through it. He said his brain made a connection between grenade and phone book even before he was conscious of being certain it was a grenade. Without letting his mind catch up enough to think he ripped the phone book off a desk along with the big heavy-duty desk cover/blotter and slammed them down on the grenade with himself on top. The explosion knocked him unconscious and he came to in the middle of what he said looked like gray confetti everywhere while his entire body was in pain: the grenade shattered the heavy plastic front cover of the phone book, pulverized all the page and blew the remains all across the room. shattered the heavy back cover, but when the explosion’s wave-front hit that desk blotter it had spent enough energy that the blotter served as an additional armor plate, the force of the explosion lifting it and him into the air. His teammates said he was already dropping onto the grenade with his improvised suppression gear by the time anyone else had finished yelling “Grenade!”
[Both of his hands needed almost total reconstruction, but other than that his “only” injury was that the entire front of his body from the lower thigh up was one massive bruise.]
On the other hand, as my sister-in-law the Boeing engineer likes to tell people, it’s better to have a plan charted out as a decision tree even if you end up tossing out the entire tree when decision time comes because you’ve already worked out possible actions and your brain will be that much closer to a proper response in the instance.
And as that Marine’s actions showed, if you’ve thought through multiple scenarios and come up with multiple responses, sometimes your brain will take over and you find yourself acting without conscious thought.
So those “discussions about morality which revolve around oughts” may never address a situation you ever actually face, but the practice of thinking through hypotheticals puts your brain ahead of the game when it’s crunch time – it’s one aspect of “develop[ing] . . . the capacity for judgment”.
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Whoa.
One spring choir tour during a pause in free-wheeling discussions on the bus where the topic had been meeting God “on the mountaintop” I was looking out the back of the bus at the long, sloping straight stretch behind us; I recall distinctly hearing a voice ask, “If you cannot find Me in the dark valleys, why do you think you can find Me on a mountaintop?”
Closer to the end of choir tour I got the flip side: We’d done a couple of concerts in inner-city churches (where the needs outnumbered the people in the churches) where the churches opened their doors for the concert to everyone in the neighborhood. We innocent college students made fumbling attempts to reach out to some of the obviously needy visitors, and that night as I dropped into bed I recall hearing, “If you don’t encounter me on the mountaintop, how will you bring Me to those in the dark valleys?”
That conundrum has gone 'round and 'round in my head, popping up every now and then, ever since.
Wow. I don’t know that I qualify! I certainly don’t feel as though I’ve entered heaven!
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There’s an argument I’ve heard for infant baptism: an infant hasn’t had time to build barriers against the grace of God as they inevitably will as they get older; babies are born into the enemy camp but have not yet become hardened rebels, and so there are no barriers against the Spirit’s entry via the waters of baptism and the Name that comes with them.
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
Heck, one of my professors my first term of college said that decades ago! Though he added that God is bigger than any box we could build even if we’d started back when Abraham was alive, so don’t bother trying to refine our boxes, instead try to throw them away.
I can no longer hear that verse without my mind jumping immediately to Joel Osteen – that false teacher has screwed up the lives of several people I know!
I discovered long ago that most people aren’t even aware they have a worldview. It was fun to watch some in a Christian study center class studying the book Why_Should_Anyone_Believe_Anything_at_All?
[Just BTW, how hard would it be to get the option of underlining things??? I tend to cringe when giving a reference that should properly be underlined.]
He’s got another book that’s related – The_Universe_Next_Door
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I’ve been looking for underline code as well, and it seems it’s just not going to work in markdown.
We could stick with the old fashioned plain text convention:
_ My Magnum Opus _
Gotta have the spaces between the text and the underscore, however, otherwise it italicizes the text. 
Depends on the atheist. Three out of four that I’ve met and engaged with here have been encouraging about faith. My experience with them shows me they are just as monolithic as theists.
It’s pretty straightforward.
Just bookend what you want to underline with [u] and [/u#] and leave out the hashmark. I use a keyboard shortcut on my iPad, ‘ulb’ for ‘underline brackets’: [u]xx[/u#] and it yields xx.
There was a physics professor at my university who deliberately set out to flunk half the class. He was actually a good instructor, he just thought that purposely failing half the class made for higher quality students going forward.
Happily for me he taught “plug and chug” physics while I was in the calculus sequence. But when I was in the junior-physics courses he was required to change his policy because a group of students managed the difficult stunt of turning in identical answers in exams for him and another professor (the tests were standard across the department) and when predictably those in his classes got slapped with low grades, those in the other professor’s class got one and a half letter grades higher – and they took those results to the department head with a very simple message: fix this or we will present our results to the student association attorney to look at.
On the other side of things, I had a math professor who really was that bad. What saved me and most of the class was that he had a grad student TA who was ten times the instructor the professor was – more than a few students found that they actually learned better if they skipped the general lecture and just attended the small group led by that TA.
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I didn’t think I was very mystical until one day sitting at a swimming hole reading a book about the Cross I encountered a passage that said that when the ancient church stated that we are shaped by Christ they didn’t mean so much that He molded us like a potter with clay but that he was the mold we were made with – and that the same is true of everything that is. I found myself sitting and staring at my hand, then at a leaf caught in a whirlpool, spinning around repeatedly in the same little bit of river, and thinking, “This was shaped by His shape” and finding that quite marvelous even though I had no idea how Jesus’ “shape” could be found in the shape of such things as my hand or that leaf.
That’s true of some surprising things. I’ve done landscaping work, and I quickly learned that a tour around the grounds to be worked on didn’t help me at all to plan; I had to see the entire grounds and once and catch the “feel” of it. I remember one lady who was puzzled when I passed on the tour and explanation and instead pulled from my truck a folding chair and a six pack of beer and proceeded to park myself here and there about the grounds and just look and absorb the place as a whole. After a bit over a half hour things suddenly came together and I let out a big, “Ahh!”, put the folding chair away and grabbed stakes and colored tape and started marking things. When I was mostly done and was just placing details she came and said, “That’s what you were doing sitting there – getting the big picture!” I nodded because I needed to get all the stakes and tape down while the gestalt was still clear in my mind.
I got other jobs due to the way she told the story of my “meditation” and the whirlwind that followed once I got all my markers down and went to work. Some of her friends that hired me couldn’t understand how looking at the grounds item by item did absolutely nothing for my planning, but sitting there apparently not even focused on what was in front of me worked. And I could never explain just what happened between soaking up the feel of the place and just knowing what was going to go where.
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The incomparable Paul O’Leary was such a TA for my programming class: Wayne State University, Spring semster 1986. He was magnificent as a TA and a human.
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You might enjoy Jenny O’Dell’s book How to do Nothing.
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More from How to do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell. This is from the end of Chapter 5, “Ecology of Strangers”:
…A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support—nor to notice that all the non-“productive” life-forms have fled. Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover.
…
Mixed neighborhoods create public simultaneous thinking, many perspectives converging on the same moment at the same time, in front of each other. Many languages, many cultures, many racial and class experiences take place on the same block, in the same buildings. Homogenous neighborhoods erase this dynamic, and are much more vulnerable to enforcement of conformity.…
When we take an instrumental or even algorithmic view of friendship and recognition, or fortify the imagined bastion of the self against change, or even just fail to see that we affect and are affected by others (even and especially those we do not see)—then we unnaturally corral our attention to others and to the places we inhabit together. It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.
…As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonders that they are. Most of all, we can open ourselves to those new and previously unimaginable ideas that may arise from our combination, like the lightning that happens between an evanescent cloud and the ever-shifting ground.
(Ellipses and emphasis added by Kendel)
There is great value in taking the risks she talks about here, as frustrating as they can be. It can show our personal failings and (current) inability to communicate well or graciously. But it teaches us to be in our world and be valuable to it as well.
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