Posted on 07/11/2008 8:06:50 AM PDT by rhema
“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”
-‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.
If you’re a liberal, yes, that IS the proper role of a government agency.
In fact, common folk don't know much about anything. That's why their called common folk.
Where'd you hatch that one from?
Ah, there it is! Thanks!
There it is.
Because it is based on the lie that intelligent design is science. It is designed to destroy the theory of evolution and replace it with fundamentalism.
Answer - deep down inside your beady little pea-brain, you know that evolution is nonsense, and you're afraid to have the underpinning for your entire chosen philosophical system knocked out from under you like so many nine-pens.
Sorry, that's nonsense. The theory of evolution just keeps getting stronger as more fossils are found and the genetic evidence mounts up.
And the poor creationists get hammered every time they change the face of creationism to try to sneak back into the schools. Creation "science" went belly up, and more recently it was intelligent design. Now they are trying this "critical analysis" line, but what will happen is predictable: some fundamentalist teacher will go whole hog teaching religion and the courts will bounce that too.
Perhaps they should leave religion for the churches and science for the schools, eh?
Wow. What an elitist, liberal thing to say.
I’m surprised you’ve lasted here since ‘01.
What does ‘fundamentalist’ mean to you?
“Perhaps they should leave religion for the churches and science for the schools, eh? “
By all means, let’s have a one sided TOE (Science) indoctrination in our tax-payer funded public schools.
Keep your theologies off my biologies!
(BTW, if that shows up on bumper stickers a month from now, I'm going to come looking for my cut).
The knowledge mankind has gained over the centuries has come at great cost and is very difficult to master.
I'm sorry that you're insulted and humiliated at having to acknowledge, even to yourself, that you are not one of those who has done it or was able to do it. Your denial reminds me of that of far too many liberals who refuse to admit that those possessed of wealth and power might actually deserve them.
Will/can you acknowledge that much of this knowledge was and is gained by Christians, and that many of those universities began as Christian institutions? And you erroneously assume much about other posters here.
Will I acknowledge the role of Christians in advancing civilization? I’d be a complete fool to deny it, wouldn’t I?
"“Be quiet and don’t question this, Kayla. We’re not informed scientists.”?
I assumed Kayla was one of your students.
The entire Theory of Evolution is founded upon assumptions just like that one.
“I’m sorry that you’re insulted and humiliated at having to acknowledge, even to yourself, that you are not one of those who has done it or was able to do it.”
Well Im neither insulted or humiliated, but I sincerely appreciate your concern.
“Your denial reminds me of that of far too many liberals who refuse to admit that those possessed of wealth and power might actually deserve them.”
This comments makes absolutely no sense.
Assumptions are assumptions. Some are right and some are not. What’s crucial is how one differentiates. You’re statement reveals you to be a complete ignoramous about the scientific method in general and Evolutionary theory in particular.
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