Republicans say: We're not educated enough to be employable for jobs of the future.

Republicans say: We'll be too smart for our ( ahem, their ) own good if we continue education after high school.

Well, at least one of you make a move...........

Then they'd stop watching Fox and know that 95% of the crap Santorum says is false.

Can't have that, can we? Insidious kommanists..............

Any person who thinks critically would leave their faith once they understood how screwball it is. College is about training people to think and analyze things. It about making decisions based on verifiable facts, experience and even reason guided intuition. It is about moving forward on knowledge and understanding rather then myth and superstition.

There is a good reason why people of faith quit practicing their faith. When they are enlightened and become critical thinkers they are more able to decide if their religious beliefs are valid or not.

Santorectum is really an evil psychopath. He really is technically insane and should be put in a straight jacket. Most of all he is a dangerous extremist.

That's as bigoted as something that Santorum would say.

I was raised Catholic and spent my entire school career in Catholic grade school, high school, jr college and regular college. That is 16 1/2 years of complete and total indoctrination into the Catholic faith. By the time I was out of 8th grade I said so many rosaries it was enough for two lifetimes. By the time I was out of college I went to so many masses that if I had $5 for each one I would have a healthy 401k. I have enough hours in theology classes, moral theology, metaphysics, religion classes of every size and variety that I could be a priest. I actually have enough hours in college to have a major in theology and philosophy. I took courses you may not have ever heard of. I even still have my daily missal for the liturgical year of the Catholic Church.

I have an excellent understanding about religion and religious practices. A lot of what passes for religion today is screwball. Religions and religious practices are supposed to be a positive enhancement to your life and offer hope. All I see is punitive, negative, hateful and destructive religious practices today. Strapping yourself with explosives and killing people is NOT religion. Hating and abusing gays is NOT religion. The Catholic church that I was raised in has gone way over the line. The clergy will protect pedophiles and persecute woman and gays. Religiously brainwashing people into doing things that they would not reasonably do is evil

We have spent two thousand years killing each other over religion. Historically most wars have been wars over religion. That alone does not make religion bad or evil. What makes it bad is forcing your beliefs about the divine on others. The Catholic church was very good about committing genocide over time. The Church history I was taught was a fabrication.

I was taught a "reasoned faith" by using knowledge and my mind to determine how my beliefs stacked up against reality. I see none of that with what is going on with religion today. I left the Catholic church because I discovered so many holes in the dogma that was being taught. To believe as we were taught meant to live a life in misery and self doubt and self hatred.

If seeing the misery that screwball religious practices are causing is bigoted, well so be it.

Your argument implied that anyone of faith is a nutjob.

The worst massacres in history were committed in the USSR and China. Guess which religion they are.

Liberal Christians is where religion should be. Liberal Christians do not seem to have a voice and they are vilified much of the time from what I can tell. Were the dialogue dominated by the liberal Christian view we would not be having these cultural wars. And you bring up a good point. There are certainly liberal factions of Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians and others who are not involved with these political wars who are just about serving their congregations.

Many of the fundamentalist churches today are not really religions at all. They are just bible selling businesses who are pushing an extreme political agenda. They are about Dominionism and dominating government policy.

Christ was a liberal. He would even be considered a communist by evangelicals. The New Testament of the Bible is about compassion, understanding, forgiveness and service to its community particularly to the sick, the old, the disadvantaged and the poor. Christ taught the need morality that supports social and economic justice if even in an indirect way. What Christ taught was the abandonment of the "punitive" Old Testament. He said many times in his ministry that he was the messenger of a new testament. He made it clear that the Old Testament was about the message of his coming and that it would play a lesser role. The Catholic Church taught that in my youth.

Today the Church has allied itself with the churches who are pushing the opposite of what the New Testament was all about. So Christ's message is being pretty much ignored by most prominent religious dialogue today. Until recent times the Catholic Church stayed out of the political arena. Now it wants to dictate to government what are "dogmatic religious practices" that are NOT in the New Testament. What the fundy churches are demanding and what the Catholic Church is demanding was created after the Bible and was NOT in the Bible.

Progressive liberal Christians and churches are more in line with the New Testament message. They have their various differences theologically. What they believe is perfectly reasonable.

I was not specifically talking about the liberal and progressive religious establishments in my post. I was painting with too broad a brush.

Ultimately supposed religious practices that have you killing yourself with suicide bombs or bombing others or persecuting others is not religion at all. Unfortunately for certain factions that IS their religion.

I agree with you 100%. I was raised in a very strict Roman Catholic Church and school. nineteen years of indoctrination, Hell, Fire and Brimstone. I always questioned what I was being taught. In second grade when one of the nun's told us that Eve was made from Adam's rib, I asked, " How do you know Adam wasn't made from Eve's rib". Early feminist.
When I was traveling throughout the world, I also found those holes in the church dogma and became a (fallen away) catholic, sanity restored, the real world opening my eyes to reality. I still have callouses on my knees from all that genuflecting. lol

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction -- Pascal

(Long wait. Sometimes you have to make them look it up in the dictionary. Most definitions come round to, 'A way of learning about nature.')
"Right, it's a way of learning about nature. By definition, any concept of a god involves the supernatural - that which is outside of nature. So by definition, it's outside the scope of the topic. We can't measure divinity. We can't test divinity. We can't falsify a hypothesis about divinely inspired creation. We don't spend a lot of time on world history or diagramming sentences in a biology classroom, and we're not going to spend a lot of time on creationism either -because it's not science.
Science is not concerned with what you believe.
It is concerned with what you know - the best model we can construct from the evidence available in the natural world.
Science doesn't deal with the metaphysical. Some of you will view that as a limitation, and that's fine. You have to understand the appropriate uses and limitations of any tool you work with."
You can potentially leave it here.
Or you can delve into ontological versus methodological naturalism, and talk about Karl Popper and the necessity of falsifiable hypotheses....
By teaching the topic this way (in a bit more depth) and having students understand what science is, I've had some amazing results.
I once had an extremely religious fundamentalist student who wanted to have a 'debate' the first time I said the word 'evolution'. He was always very insistent on trying to get me to divulge my faith (or lack thereof). I always responded, "If you are ever able to determine what I personally believe, I've failed to be sufficiently objective. This is about knowing the material and understanding the models - not about personal beliefs."
Baby steps.
First, they have to understand that what you are teaching is not a threat to their faith - or they'll shut down and refuse to ever accept it.
Second, they have to know - academically - what evolution is and what the available evidence for it is. A proper understanding of the definition of evolution and the support for it leads almost inexorably to step three...
Third, once they know, then they tend to believe. They can't help themselves. (They usually also continue to believe in their creation myths - but at least they can define evolution properly.)
Two weeks after he first challenged me to a debate, another student (who had been out sick for the past two weeks) piped up when I said 'evolution'.
"Evolution!? You believe that crap?"
Fundie kid in the front row turns around and says, "Of course he does you idiot, we all do."
Not necessarily appropriate - but heart-warming nonetheless.



from :http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/q0ee4/i_aint_even_mad/c3try9d

I went to Catholic Schools for 16 1/2 years. We studied things like metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, theology etc. It was intrinsically understood how science differed from religion and how the two can actually accent each other. And it was also very obvious how the Bible and other religious books fit into the scheme of things. I was able to study the history of the evolution of the scientific method. Most students are NOT taught the differences among these various schools of learning. In fact many students do not even know that they exist.

You post is excellent. The real truth is that no one who still lives really knows absolutely if their religious beliefs are actually true. No one has actual proof that an afterlife exists. Until the living can bring back the dead and ask we will not know in any absolute way.

and gives one of the best arguments and reasons I've read.

I am now 68 years old and am more thankful for my education than ever. I run into very few people today who have anything near what I was exposed to over 16 1/2 years. I went to the finest Catholic schools of their time and was taught by the best minds of any time. In grade school they were ALL dedicated nuns. In high school, Jr College and College they were all highly educated nuns and priests. Many of the priests had masters or Phd's in their major field.

Besides that I have a degree in Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theater and a minor in Art History. I was in the military and spent 24 years at DOL. A BFA is a liberal arts degree on super steroids. And I had to complete and survive a four hour written exam senior year even to get the degree.

No question that teach has it exactly right about how he teaches. And that is the problem. None of the the schools of knowledge or disciplines are explained as to where their boundaries are. In the Catholic school system those boundaries were very clearly defined over time and separated.

I. A liberal arts education teaches you how to think

1. You will develop strength of mind and an ordered intellect. The mind is like a muscle; exercise makes it stronger and more able to grasp ideas and do intellectual work. Exercising the mind in one area--whether literature or sociology or accounting--will strengthen it for learning in other areas as well. What at first was so difficult--the habits of attention and concentration, the ability to follow arguments, and the ability to distinguish the important from the trivial and to grasp new concepts--all these become easier as the mind is exercised and enlarged by varied study.
You will also learn that thinking has its own grammar, its own orderly structure and set of rules for good use. Many subjects help the student to develop an ordered mind, and each subject contributes in a slightly different way. A careful study of computer programming or mathematics or music or logic or good poetry--or all of these--will irresistibly demonstrate the structure of thought and knowledge and intellectual movement, and will create the habit of organized thinking and of rational analysis. Once you develop good thinking habits, you will be able to perform better in any job, but more importantly, the happier your life will be. After your class in programming or poetry you may never write another line of code or verse, but you will be a better husband or wife or teacher or businessman or psychologist, because you will take with you the knowledge of organized solutions, of hierarchical procedures, of rational sequences that can be applied to any endeavor.

2. You will be able to think for yourself. The diverse body of knowledge you will gain from a liberal arts education, together with the tools of examination and analysis that you will learn to use, will enable you to develop your own opinions, attitudes, values, and beliefs, based not upon the authority of parents, peers, or professors, and not upon ignorance, whim, or prejudice, but upon your own worthy apprehension, examination, and evaluation of argument and evidence. You will develop an active engagement with knowledge, and not be just the passive recipient of a hundred boring facts. Your diverse studies will permit you to see the relations between ideas and philosophies and subject areas and to put each in its appropriate position.

Good judgment, like wisdom, depends upon a thoughtful and rather extensive acquaintance with many areas of study. And good judgment requires the ability to think independently, in the face of pressures, distortions, and overemphasized truths. Advertisers and politicians rely on a half-educated public, on people who know little outside of their own specialty, because such people are easy to deceive with so-called experts, impressive technical or sociological jargon, and an effective set of logical and psychological tricks.

Thus, while a liberal arts education may not teach you how to take out an appendix or sue your neighbor, it will teach you how to think, which is to say, it will teach you how to live. And this benefit alone makes such an education more practical and useful than any job-specific training ever could.

3. The world becomes understandable. A thorough knowledge of a wide range of events, philosophies, procedures, and possibilities makes the phenomena of life appear coherent and understandable. No longer will unexpected or strange things be merely dazzling or confusing. How sad it is to see an uneducated mind or a mind educated in only one discipline completely overwhelmed by a simple phenomenon. How often have we all heard someone say, "I have no idea what this book is talking about" or "I just can't understand why anyone would do such a thing." A wide ranging education, covering everything from biology to history to human nature, will provide many tools for understanding. Context is crucial for full understanding, and a general knowledge of the world gives you that context.

II. A liberal arts education teaches you how to learn.....snip

http://www.virtualsalt.com/libarted.htm


My Dad told me something like this when I started college. I'm thankful for my education. Faith
doesn't train the mind even when I tried to pass a tough course..... LOL

"The wonderful thing about science is that it's true whether you believe it or not."

A hypothesis that is not falsifiable through use of the scientific method is not one worth entertaining.

But I don't remember any indoctrination in college. I remember a general ed class (biology) where the professor talked glowingly about Limbaugh. I ignored him until he got back on subject. One of my majors was Spanish, and because I became good friends with one of the professors, I knew he was pretty liberal. Another student, who was very conservative and a good friend of mine, would try to engage him in class, especially about things Limbaugh said. He would smile and mention that he probably wouldn't agree with much he had to say and then begin the lesson.

I was never much of a church-goer, but I remember a lot of my friends, both liberal and conservative, kept up their church-going, joined Campus Crusade for Christ (or whatever it's called), etc., and just to learn more about Latin culture, I would attend some Spanish-language masses - more for the free potluck dinner and hanging out with good-looking Latinas afterwards though but still!

TlalocW

Yah, the serfs were a lot easier to control when they were illiterate. I could see why his ilk don't want people to be informed or to challenge their pre-conceived notions about the world. Its harder to send them off to crusades if they have any idea about what the fuck is going on outside of what they're told by their masters.

kids brains taste better when they've been thinking about donuts.

kids learn to read and write. That's bad already.

Yeah, let's put that guy in charge.

Oh, that will never happen. Besides, if you are a parent at all you MUST be religious and conservative?????

... the only schools that would be denied funding would be the religiously oriented ones.


Did he actually attend a real university?

So of course nuts like Santorum does not want anyone to use their brain.

someone who is clearly insane or someone who plays to a base that is clearly insane?

It's really hard to tell which catagory ass froth falls into.

or more retrograde, Icky Ricky tops himself.

fuck the american theocracy

No wonder they're so anti intellectual.

values and points of view are based on ignorance. Interesting.