Tag Archives: Secular

News

How do secular leftist professors feel about Christian students?

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From the Alliance Defense Fund.

Excerpt:

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “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.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “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.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “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.”  He helpfully explains that “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.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function.

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

I was just having a conversation with a couple of left-wing Christians on Facebook who were telling me how Christianity was compatible with left-wing politics. They have no idea what they are talking about – they just don’t know what they are up against. They are the ones who vote for more funding for public schools, thinking they are innocuous.

One of the reasons that kept me from marrying is that I didn’t meet anyone in university who took this threat as seriously as I do. If you believe that children should be influential for the Christ, then reading that excerpt should scare you. But if babies are just for baby pictures, then it’s not really a big deal. But it’s a big deal to me.

News

How universities discriminate against evangelical Christians

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From the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

We are preparing for trial in a very important religion discrimination case in Kentucky that’s likely to attract a lot of attention.

We represent Professor Martin Gaskell, an internationally-respected astronomer who was turned down for the post of Observatory Director at the University of Kentucky in 2007 after concerns were voiced that some of his writings contained in a personal website discussing the relationship between science and religion showed him to be “potentially evangelical.”

Professor Gaskell has filed suit against the University claiming that, by considering his religion in the hiring process, Kentucky violated Title VII, the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

The University of Kentucky tried to avoid a trial, but Judge Karl Forester ruled that there was enough evidence to go to trial, such as:

  • The record contains “substantial evidence that Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position until the issue of his religion” became part of the search committee’s deliberations.
  • The head of the search committee wrote in an email to the Chair of the Physics & Astronomy Department that “no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin [Gaskell] on any basis other than religious . . .”
  • The Department Chair admitted “that the debate generated by Gaskell’s website and his religious beliefs was an ‘element’ in the decision not to hire Gaskell.”
  • One member of the search committee admitted that Gaskell’s “views of religious things” were “a factor” in his decision not to support Gaskell’s candidacy.
  • Another member of the committee, having discovered Gaskell’s website, warned fellow committee members that Gaskell was “potentially evangelical.”
  • The search committee head, anticipating a decision against Gaskell by his fellow committee members, wrote that “Other reasons will be given for the choice . . . but the real reason we will not offer him the job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the other duties specified for this position.”

This is why I blog under an alias. And I recommend it to any evangelical Christian who aspires to have an influence in academia.

 

Videos

Public school bus driver blasts little girl for discussing Christianity

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From Lone Wolf Archer. (H/T Neil Simpson’s latest round-up)

Story is here. (This link also has a video with more of the audio of the bus driver)

Excerpt:

After the girl was dropped off, Zimmer said a bus camera showed Campbell telling the students, “If you can’t believe in tolerance toward one another, you don’t belong here. You belong in a parochial, church school.”

Zimmer also claims the bus driver questioned another student about whether Rachael ever said anything racist to him.

“If she says anything racial to you, I want to know about it, because I am going to eat her alive,” Zimmer said Campbell can be heard saying on the tape. “You’re a smart guy. Rachael is a stupid little bigot.”

Zimmer said Campbell then came back to the girl’s home after all of the children had been let off the bus and brought Rachael and her older sister, who were home alone at the time, onto her empty bus, berating Rachael about her opinions on gay marriage.

“Say we’re a gay couple …and we go to China … and she would adopt a child. She comes back, and if she dies, that child isn’t mine. You can’t keep that kid,” Zimmer said Campbell is heard saying on the tape. “Or I’m filthy rich and she is not, I die, she does not inherit my money. That’s what this is all about.”

When he asked the school district why Campbell wasn’t disciplined, Zimmer said he was told she was working within the scope of her employment.

Notice that the father is forced to pay for these government schools through mandatory taxation. And also note that the school’s only response was to deny that anything was wrong. That’s why public schools are EVIL. We need to have vouchers so that parents can get their money back and send their children to schools they actually want. I think that my fear is that we as Christians are not really serious about protecting our children. We want to have marriages, and families, and children, but we are not really willing to learn about the problems that our children will face from anti-Christian public schools.

If you want to understand what people who are on the other side think of what was done to that little girl, then go to this atheistic blog and read the comments. Warning: there is vulgar language. Atheism is an amoral worldview. And it’s the worldview that is increasingly present in the Democrat party, which is hostile to public expressions of Christian faith.

My plan at this point is homeschooling for kindergarten through grade 6, then private schools all the way on from there. I wish I could get my money back from the government for these public schools, health services, and pensions that they are providing to everyone else, but oh well.