The Perils of Lazy Pluralism (Should Harvard Divinity School Still Exist?)
mattbieber.netI get the feeling that Bieber is dissatisfied with his investment of time and student loans, but that doesn't logically generalize to shuttering the school. Like any religion, if it's not for you, then it's not for you. Especially if you knew going in that you're an atheist.
Pluralism isn't actually inevitable in schools of religion (if one wanted to study in an environment of nothing but conservative Southern Baptism, one would be spoiled for choice), but it's probably the only philosophy that would work when training ministers at a place like Harvard. Critiques of religion, possibly including those Bieber has, are interesting and worth considering, and probably are considered at more doctrinally self-assured places like e.g. Notre Dame. If that's the sort of thing Bieber wanted to study, however, he should have found somewhere else to do so. It's almost a archetype of the asshole atheist, that he would want to proselytize for his atheism in the same institution in which others are training for religious ministry.
You might enjoy this Long Now talk by James Carse: http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/jan/14/religious-war-in-li...
Excellent article, and it calls to mind this article I saw on the LA Times website recently: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0115-zuckerman-se...
I like to describe myself as being vaguely 'militantly agnostic'[1] ("I don't know, and you don't either," as one of my favorite bumper stickers reads), and so this quote from the OP resonates with me:
But I wondered if she hadn’t swung too far in
the opposite direction, associating propositional
inquiry with religion-haters and then dismissing
it entirely.
I do think that this kind of "Lazy Pluralism" also does the disservice of excluding from polite conversation those of us who, for one reason or another, have the same kind of emotional attachment to "propositional inquiry" that many aspiring clergy have to their faith traditions, or who want to find the larger Truths just by looking at regular truths.
Our type seem to nowadays have no home in discussions of not only religion, where you would expect it, but also philosophy, where naturalism is a weirdly embattled position accepted even in weak form by only half the field.
Personally, it does feel "ideologically homeless" to find that I'm largely locked out of discussing larger questions with people simply because I have only truths and no Truth.
So arrogant. But yes, as soon as HDS ceased to be Christian, it should have disbanded. Little point in existing nowadays.
HDS seems to be one of the places I wouldn't want to spend even one minute of my life. I find it hard to invent more pointless things to discuss than these.
It sounds like great practice for HN:
'''Anthropologist Michael Jackson once summed up the HDS ethos. “You don’t walk up to people and tell them their beliefs are wrong,” he said. “That’s just rude.” '''
I suppose, that's a question of culture. If truth is something that can be approximated or found, then having my beliefs shaken is something to be welcomed if it can bring me “closer to the truth” (whatever that may be). If, however, truth is present a priori, and my beliefs just a path to it, then having them shaken would remove me further from that assumed truth, and that would indeed be “rude”.
If your quoted sentence were true unqualifiedly, then science could not exist. Science is shaking-your-beliefs-as-a-way-of-life. Every single day.
As has been pointed out many times, that's the difference between science and religion. From day, scientists are trained to understand their beliefs and understandings must be based on the evidence before them, and that if the evidence no longer supports the belief, a new belief must be adopted. Religion is based on the idea that the belief is right, and everything else must adopt to it, regardless of the evidence.