Billions of People Need to Unlearn the Bible
Any college teacher in the fields of behavioral science, humanities or the arts learns the biggest challenge to teaching is not learning new things but unlearning wrong things. Students move to college from their homes and communities with ideas like, "We gave Indians money to resettle. They are poor because they are lazy," "America is great because it was blessed by God," or "Women were born to serve men." Exposing students to information challenging what they learned back home is the first step.
A challenging area for professor in science are beliefs the earth and everything on it was created by God. About 1900 a physicist said we knew everything there was to know about physics. We've added to knowledge since then and it never seems to stop.
A giant question is where did the universe come from? Most everything else about where we came from has been figured out. We know, for example we developed from evolution and were not created by a god.
Professor Richard Dawkins predicted in his book, The God Delusion, that we will know much more about the universe. A resent article suggests progress will soon be made in this direction. It is a machine that, while I understand little about it, hurls atoms with the same force as the that which took place when stars and planets were formed.
If the field of physics figures out where the planet earth came from and it was not "created by God" we can ignore yet another part of the collection of myths, the Bible. Already, many parts of the Bible passionately believed by people of our grandparent's time have had to be abandoned. Many of the books claimed to have been written by Paul were not. The names on the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by men with those names. No one who wrote the Bible was present when the events told of in the Bible took place. So, people in the pews have already been forced to unlearn large parts of the Bible.
More needs to be unlearned.
atheist sponsored "re-education camps"? the Bolsheviks would have been proud of you.
ReplyDeleteon second thought maybe you could use a little re-education yourself.
ReplyDelete"Any college teacher in the fields of behavioral science, humanities or the arts ..."
ReplyDeleteThose "teachers" are actually propagandists. They have an agenda based on an ultra-liberal philosophy. I learned nothing from these profs. In fact, whatever I was "taught" I un-learned rapidly. Got my "A" and checked off a graduation requirement.
Nowhere in my technical studies did any professor - true teachers and researchers of advanced and current science+engineering - dip his toe in religion. No professor denigrated religion. That was one thing I truly enjoyed about learning science and engineering.
Liberals have ruined the soft sciences.
Matt November 29, 2019 @ 6:47 PM; From your experience teachers of the behavioral sciences, humanities, and the arts, are liberal propagandists and have ruined these “soft sciences”. Take a minute and share with us how you would resurrect and salvage the ruined soft sciences. Maybe a litmus test for instructors to weed out the liberal propagandists thereby only certifying conservative propagandists. Or simply limit higher education to the hard sciences and a deep dive into the catechism. On the positive side your experience with the liberal propaganda of the soft sciences affirmed and justified your deep dive. You seem happy with the result.
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DeleteMatt "No (engineering) professor denigrated religion..Liberals have ruined the soft sciences."
DeleteWe had a Dean of Engineering at NDSU a few years back, a very religious person, who told some faculty privately that he did not believe women should be in the field of engineering. He did allow 2 or 3 to be hired but they moved to other universities in a few years.
I think you would be hard pressed to find any faculty member who espoused atheism in his/her classroom. Bart Ehrman, a nonbeliever, teaches religion in the Bible Belt. You can bet legislators there would have him fired if he taught students they should not be Christian.
He does, for example, have students carefully note, for example, all descriptions in the Bible of crucifixion and resurrection are report what they found. They, of course, find there are contradictions which they had been taught back home did not exist. This is good teaching and not propaganda.
The textbooks I used and my lectures sited data that most welfare recipients receive welfare for only brief periods of their lives. Only a small percentage receive it for long periods. This is contrary to what many students were taught by their parents. No doubt some thought this was teaching liberalism.
On the brighter side, a unique intersection of science and religion, non-Abrahamic of course, is the teaching of one of the schools of Hindu philosophy and that of contemporary physics. This philosophy teaches a familiar account of the beginning. At first the whole of the universe is compressed in a primordial seed which eventually germinates and explodes resulting in the sound of creation, a vibration, the OM. We hear this as the mantra in some forms of meditation. All creation proceeds from this vibration. This account of the creation of the universe is a Big Bang theory.
ReplyDeleteOn the dimmer side, the technology spawned by modern science has enabled religions of all kinds to spread their teachings far beyond the physical houses of worship and the printed page of their holy books. In our neck of the woods we can get a full dose of Christianity on schedule or on-demand from a variety of devices. At first blush it would seem that science has enabled the spread of the gospel beyond the fondest dreams of any Christian tradition. The Holy Spirit is surfing the ubiquitous waves of electrons. But alas, the downside is a slippery slope. Along with the good much of the ugliness is fully exposed. I bet many a clergyman longs to round up and corral the flock in brick and mortar like the good old days as they take the pulpit on the sabbath and count the offering after the service. Trouble is there are fewer sheep in the meadow.
re. "fewer sheep"; Sounds like "The remnant". Sheep don't count money. Only the economists do. Come on over. The grass is greener.
DeleteIt's been my often repeated observation there needs to be more learning than unlearning. Many if not most so called Christians have not actually read the Bible, even more so, especially without the systematic aid of word study, context and chronology. Much of what many Christians "know' is by word of mouth, resulting in dis/ mis information, or false information. It is easy to be a Christian without even touching the Bible, but what is the source of their information?. Poorly educated preachers, cult of the preacher, sensational publications, only articles they want to hear, ie. prosperity, works related, apocolyptic, and political infused theology, pietism, Christian Zionism, the absence of historical/ grammatical/contextual critical , And of course the "Great Church" loaded with so many accretions, the central core of Christianity is almost lost. And last, but not least, ignorance, and real laziness in learning the actual content of the Bible.
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