Back in the 1980s I was given the opportunity to teach for a year in the Rhode Island State prison. I was teaching full-time at nearbye Barrington College at the time and took this extra opportunity to expand my horizons, both academic and personal. The first semester I taught a World Religions course to about a dozen inmates who were in the more relaxed security unit. At first I was a bit nervous, especially when one fellow seemed upset that I was getting chalk-dust on him when erasing the blackboard. Then he asked me if I had any money on me that I could give him. In the end he assured me that he was “Just jivin’ me”.
Overall, the course went along smoothly following the outline presented in a standard World Religions text by Huston Smith. There were two black men in the class who professed the Islamic faith so when we got to Islam they were especially interested and vocal. They wore the headgear that traditional Muslim men wear. When I asked them how wearing that headdress went for them, they replied that when they wore the head-dress they received a lot more respect. The other men in the class paid tight attention to them when they spoke.
Toward the end of the course one man who had been pretty quiet throughout the semester spoke up: “Jer, he said, I get confused by all the different religions I see all around me. There’s the Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Seventh Day Adventurists.” Everyone laughed when he said “Seventh Day Adventurists”, but he did not get the joke until one of his buddies explained it to him. Many of these men spent a good deal of time in the library, some of them studying for their appeals and upcoming citizenship examinations.
The next semester I was “promoted” to teach a class to the men in the Maximum Security Unit. There were only six of them and our class was the only time they had contact with any other prisoners. They lived in solitary cells. I was told by a guard that two of the men had been part of a “Murder Incorporated” group in Florida and that they were in Rhode Island as part of a prisoner distribution program. All three were in prison for committing murder.
I taught a course called the “Search for Meaning” in which we read and discussed “Zorba the Greek” by Nikos Kazantzakis, “The Plague” by Albert Camus, and “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Victor Frankel. These last two books came very close to home for these men and they spoke both openly and strongly about their content. Three of them came every week having read and thought a lot about the events and ideas in the books. Along the way they had a great deal to say about their situation and how they were treated by the guards.
It was “The Plague” that seemed to grab their attention and feelings most forcefully. The admitted to feeling trapped like the citizens of Oran, and to devising similar ways to deal with their “trapped-ness”. At the end of the course, I went to great lengths to arrange to show the film “Zorba the Greek” to them. It was complicated, but well worth the trouble. They did not usually get to see any films at all because of being confined to their own individual cells. They laughed, yelled at Zorba, and loved being the scenery of the island of Crete.
I will admit that I sometimes wondered if I should be worried about being alone with these men who had committed murder, but as the weeks went bye I came to feel at home in my situation. They showed me great respect and expressed great curiosity. The third semester I taught “Creative Writing” to men in Minimum Security, specifically men who had committed sex crimes of some sort. These men were much more like guys on the outside, in a college class, for instance. Many of them were quite smart and some were quite talented writers. I got along well with these guys, and we all learned some good things about how and how not to write brief essays and stories.
I guess all in all I preferred the Maximum Security class because it was the most intense and challenging and the Minimum security class the least for the opposite reasons. All in all it was a wonderful learning experience for me and although I have tried to do it again elsewhere the opportunity has never materialized. I hope I had some positive effect and I certainly learned a great deal.

Berkeley, born in Ireland in 1685, is usually classified as an “Empiricist”, along with two other Brits John Locke and David Hume. But as you will see, he was a character all his own. He started out following Locke claiming that all we have on which to base our knowledge claims are the “impressions” made on our minds by sense data. Locke ended up not being able to explain where these sense data come from since we do not actually “see” or experience the “objects” making up the physical world directly, Our minds shape our various sense data into objects.
It occurred to Berkeley that perhaps all this talk about sense data and impressions forming the objects we experience in our minds is simply “extra baggage”. Would it not be easier to do away with all this talk about physical objects altogether and simply stick with what we do in fact experience, namely mental sense data. Berkeley argued that “physical objects” are nothing but figments of our imaginations, or rather, figments of the imaginations of philosophers. What we actually experience are various combinations of sense data that come to us on a regular basis, and we learn to call these “physical objects.”
So, Berkeley concluded that things would be a lot simpler and rational if we would stick with talk about our sense data and simply drop all this talk about hypothetical “physical objects” altogether. As a Bishop in the Anglican Church, his next move was unsurprising. He claimed that reality is exclusively comprised of our minds and that of God, the Superior Mind. God has arranged for our minds to receive the ideas from His mind, the combination of which comprise what we call the “real world”. In short, our world, the sum total of all the sense data we receive, is the result of our “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Clearly, Berkeley thought that he had herby constructed a new and foolproof argument for the existence of God.
In a sense, to be sure, nothing has really changed. Berkeley’s argument for the non-existence of physical objects and the existence of God leaves everything as it was, except now we will talk only of sense-data and various combinations thereof instead of “physical objects”. These combinations come directly from the mind of God not from some fictious things called “physical objects”. As strange as all this sounds, no less a great mind as that of Bertrand Russell claimed that: “While no one has ever been able to refute Berkeley, neither has anyone ever taken him seriously.” It seems that Berkeley has simply altered the terminology that we use to speak of our experience without actually altering the world of reality. Something seems to have gone amuck here. Absolutely valid yet empty.
Berkeley, of course, thought he had not only solved the difficulties of metaphysics and epistemology, as well as that of theology too, all in one stroke. Clearly, his position as a Bishop in the Anglican Church was secured. Surprisingly, however, Berkeley had even broader plans. He proposed to start a Church related college in Bermuda in order to convert the natives there to Christianity. He submitted his plan to the Queen and departed for Rhode Island in America to wait for the necessary funds to arrive. Unfortunately, they never did materialize, and Berkeley returned to Ireland where he continued his work as a Bishop. I have visited his Rhode Island home, which is still standing and well-kept as a tourist attraction.
Interestingly enough David Hume, the ultimate empiricist, skeptic, and critic of religion, took Berkeley’s line of thought one step further. He argued that we cannot even know whether our future experiences will be like the past ones, since there is no valid reason to assume that the future will be like the past. All we can know, according to Hume, is how our experience has been in the past. The world may simply go bonkers and we will be left holding the bag.