Posted on 08/24/2014 1:44:13 PM PDT by ReformationFan
This year the movie God Is Not Dead preyed on every Christian parent’s fear of sending a child off to college only to have their family’s faith and values undermined by an atheist college professor espousing some form of moral relativism. The movie hinges on a certain cliché, but the cliché is a cliché because many of us took a class with “that professor.” He might not have been so over-the-top, but his prejudices were evident.
The American university tends to be fairly hostile to the conservative movement. One of the core tenets of conservatism is the Judeo-Christian teaching that humans are fallen creatures. Moral right and wrong are objective categories, and human nature tends toward the wrong in absence of coercion. God-given social structures, e.g., family, community, and government, help restrain wickedness.
Progressivism, on the other hand, tends to view the human spirit as intrinsically good. For some progressives, “good” becomes a relative term defined by the individual. The only “bad” is to infringe on another person’s ability to express their own version of “good.”
It is no secret that most university professors are progressives, and over the last forty years, universities have replaced real virtues with tolerance and diversity. The prevailing spirit of progressivism has led to many forms of insanity on college campuses. Yale’s Sex Week is perhaps the most notorious example of how American universities celebrate the demise of tradition, but moral relativism permeates every college classroom.
Many conservatives blame left-leaning professors for this rise in moral relativism. Certainly a liberal faculty will promote progressive values, but the battle for conservatism was lost long before these students ever met their first college professor. In my experience, freshmen arrive on campus as moral relativists.
(Excerpt) Read more at theaquilareport.com ...
“That professor was pretty much in every class even 35 years ago.
> Many conservatives blame left-leaning professors for this rise in moral relativism. Certainly a liberal faculty will promote progressive values, but the battle for conservatism was lost long before these students ever met their first college professor. In my experience, freshmen arrive on campus as moral relativists.
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From Wikipedia:
Progressivism is a broad political philosophy based on the Idea of Progress, which asserts that advances in science, technology, economic development, and social organization can improve the human condition.
Progressivism became highly significant during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, out of the belief that Europe was demonstrating that societies could progress in civility from barbaric conditions to civilization through strengthening the basis of empirical knowledge as the foundation of society.
Figures of the Enlightenment believed that progress had universal application to all societies and that these ideas would spread across the world from Europe.
Sociologist Robert Nisbet finds that "No single idea has been more important than ... the Idea of Progress in Western civilization for three thousand years" and defines five "crucial premises" of the Idea of Progress as being: value of the past, nobility of Western civilization, worth of economic/technological growth, faith in reason and scientific/scholarly knowledge obtained through reason, intrinsic importance and worth of life on earth.
Beyond this, the meanings of progressivism have varied over time and from different perspectives.
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I don't see anywhere that humans are intrinsically good. I also see ONE person's definition of "progressivism."
HORSE puckey.
Both are ideas, relative morality and "feel-good" are immeasurably selfish and egocentric.
The author was speaking of the present American ideological camp that generally describes itself as Progressive, not addressing 300 years of philosophical and ideological history.
This camp was known as Progressive from the late 1800s through about the 1920s, when they changed it to Liberal. In recent decades they changed it back to Progressive.
I strongly suspect most conservatives are Progressives in the Wiki definition sense. I know I am. I just don’t believe Progress is inevitable.
IOW, the author has described the beliefs of an American group that has chosen to use this title for themselves reasonably accurately. Take up any misuse or abuse of the term with them, not the author.
The students are moral relativists because they were trained that way from their earliest years in the public schools.
How so do you ask?
Mostly in social studies, sex education and English classes. Common Core is the attempt to generalize this type of education throughout the entire curriculum,
But, how have they managed to do it?
They have the children go through very subtle exercises designed to wring out any moral ideas they may have, the ones given to them by their parents and their religious instruction.
They begin by making a parent's influence negligible. For instance, they will say to the children, "Your parents are from a different generation." It is that simple. And they follow that with ideas designed to make the teacher the most important authority figure in that child's life.
What does a child do when he has been disengaged from his parents and their way of thinking? He is sent adrift disengaged from his only real lifeline.
There is evidence of learned immorality all around us: school shootings, a pervasive drug culture, prisons filled with people who have no moral center, sex before marriage.
Now most kids will half-heartedly listen to their lessons at first, but eventually most of the kids, like the author described, "three-fourths" of his students were moral relativists.
The lessons have been around so long that even the teachers teaching it all have no idea they were indoctrinated when they were kids.
Let me say that this type of education is real sneaky and Bill Ayers alludes to it when he describes its success and his satisfaction that they were as successful as they were.
What this type of education really does is it numbs the student to their soul. It is a great recipe for sociopaths. The conscience is so numb the student decides he has no need for it.
So we get a populace who act within differing degrees of sociopathy, just as the moral relativists designed it.
Thank you Bill Ayers.
Yeah, I agree with all that, although it seems to be a personal definition of this Nisbet fellow.
As P.J. O'Rourke observed, "If you think there was some Golden Age in the past in which everything was better, I have one word for you: dentistry."
Robert Nisbet was one of the great conservative intellectuals of post WWII America. Not as well known as Russell Kirk but just as well worth reading.
The ‘History of the Idea of Progress’ was one of his main areas of interest and the title of one of his books.
I never had one of those professors.
I met mine the first semester of college. He was teaching a course entitled “The New Testament.” The course basically was that the Gospels were a fabrication, based on an unknown Source Q.
It seems to me that progressivism views people as essentially good in that it asserts that we can attain utopia merely by doing things correctly. That is, progressives think ultimate human potential is good and that this potential can be reached through human efforts alone.
My library catalog has his name listed, but no books. I’ll have to keep an eye out in the used book store.
Nothing new here, from the French Revolution onwards Gnostic ideas have been openly promoted, subverting the Christian west.
Man, you see, is not a sinner...as the Bible and Christianity says he is, all that is lie, Christian preachers put a “guilt trip” on people. Salvation is not through Christ the Son of God as savior, it is through “knowledge” (Gnosis), knowledge of man’s own righteousness, some Gnostics go far to say knowledge of one’s own deity.
Christian preachers lie to people teaching that Christ is the only one with deity as Son of God, man is a god himself, he is just ignorant of it, all he needs is gnostic “wisdom” and he is “saved.” Humanists love this kind of philosophy, it puts man at the center of all things, instead of God, socialists their first cousins (since the days of the French Revolution) do also.
It is thus no surprise that our colleges and schools of higher learning, which are all about gaining “knowledge,” have been infested with gnostic-humanist professors.
It’s the serpent’s “knowledge” which seduced Eve in the garden of Eden (gnosticism) at work all around us.
‘History of the Idea of Progress’, ‘The Present Age’, ‘Quest for Community’ are three Robert Nisbet books that I recall. And he used to write articles for Chronicles magazine.
I always found the time I spent reading Robert Nisbet to be time well spent. Liberty Fund may still offer some of his books.
Thanks! Maybe I can find one without actually going to Amazon.com and paying retail+shipping!
Well, of course. That's the way most FAITHS view people. Human POTENTIAL can always POSSIBLY be good, since we ALL have choice. That is simple logic.
But, if human effort alone is all that is needed, then they are atheists. All faiths require an Almighty's "grace" or blessings, or whatever. I can't think of a faith where people can "go it alone."
I see. Thanks for your explanation.
It’s out of stock, even if I were prepared to order it right now.
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