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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 29 2016, @01:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-takes-all-kinds dept.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html?_r=0

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren't conservatives. Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We're fine with people who don't look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that's a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical. "Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black," he told me. "But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close."

I've been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

"Much of the 'conservative' worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false," said Carmi. "The truth has a liberal slant," wrote Michelle. "Why stop there?" asked Steven. "How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?"

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don't have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren't at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @04:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @04:07PM (#394779)

    Your problem is you are so blind you can't even see that your belief system meets every qualification for the word "Religion." Science, properly understood, can't answer any of the Big Questions required to produce a civilization.

    There is some argument that "Science" is a form of "Religion." There are two key differences between it and most religions, though.
    1) They openly acknowledge what they don't know, and work to try to answer those questions. For example, there is a huge open question of "dark matter" and "dark energy." Physicists know it is a problem, they are working to solve it, and they are letting the public know what they are trying to do to solve it (albeit maybe with a time delay to be "first to publish"). They don't just dismiss things with platitudes like, "God works in mysterious ways."
    2) Science produces things which are testable and reproducible. For example, they say "gravity work like this," and you can disprove it by dropping something and timing it. They say "light waves bend like that," and you can disprove it by shining light through a prism. In contrast, religions are an end unto themselves and untestable. For example, let's say somebody says "everything you think is wrong, the only way to get to Heaven is to murder somebody," (and you would possibly be rewarded with numerous virgins there)... how could you disprove this?

    Those are questions entirely out of scope for Science, for answers to those questions one must exit the Sciences and head over to the Religion and Philosophy Departments.

    This seems like something of a Red Herring. As you note, Science is amoral (not immoral, amoral). It is a mechanism to determine the "rules" of how things work. I've not heard a single scientist ever say "the Science says we must do XYZ."

    The much more common (and easy to mistake) thing I've heard is, "the Science says we must do XYZ to avoid ABC, which is bad." So for example, Anthropogenic Global Warming. I've never heard somebody say, "Science says we need to cut carbon emissions just because Science (like 'God says it is a sin' a.k.a. Sharia Law)." I've always heard "Science says if we don't cut carbon emissions we could end up with run-away greenhouse effect which will raise sea-levels, reduce crops, and other effects. As having all those things happen would be bad (judgment call, not a Science assertion), we must cut carbon emissions."