Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Truth

We hear complaints all the time from conservatives that universities "indoctrinate" students with liberal ideas, and are hostile to conservatism. Not so. We don't "indoctrinate" students, we educate them. The problem is that modern conservative beliefs are incompatible with truth and logic. Here are many true facts.


  • The universe is approximately 13.81 billion years old. 
  • The earth is a bit more than 4.5 billion years old. 
  • The earliest compelling evidence for life on earth is about 3.7 billion years old.
  • The oldest known fossils that are anatomically the same as ours are about 300,000 years old.
  • All life on earth today has a common ancestor, from which innumerable species descended and differentiated by evolution -- mutation and selection. (No, we aren't descended from monkeys.)
  • At the time of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Africans were legally enslaved in all 13 colonies. It was not until 1804 that all of the northern states had passed laws abolishing slavery, but abolition was generally phased in. The last slave in New York was freed in 1827.
  • All of the southern states continued to enslave Africans until the Confederacy was defeated in the Civil War. The reason the southern states seceded was to protect the institution of slavery.
  • After the Civil War, the white population of the south used organized terrorism to deprive the newly freed people of political and civil rights, property and economic opportunity.
  • The Bible is not historically accurate. It is a collection of old myths and fables, deliberate fictions, propaganda and fanciful ideas. It is riddled with internal contradictions, and contradictions to what is provable about history. 
  • Joseph R. Biden won the 2020 presidential election, and it wasn't even close. The election was free, fair and honestly conducted. 

There are obviously much more complicated ideas with which college students contend. We teach them about a wide range of knowledge and ideas; where there are controversies, or alternative explanations, we present them. We also teach critical thinking -- how to evaluate evidence and apply logic to solve problems and reach conclusions.

 

When students have the opportunity to do that, they sometimes end up disagreeing with their parents about certain matters. That's the way it is. Old and wrong beliefs and ideas, we hope, will be supplanted by better ones. If you truly care for your children, you will want them to contribute to that process, which is the only way in which humanity can survive and thrive. If your concept of conservatism is opposed to that then yes, universities -- with the exception of ones established precisely for the purpose of ideological indoctrination, such as Liberty University -- are not congenial to your belief. In that case we are at a impasse.

 

 

 

 

3 comments:

Don Quixote said...

From page 417 of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous:

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life —unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.”

Cervantes said...

I would say the context is different so the meaning isn't exactly the same. But the idea that we have to accept the universe as it is, and not insist on it being what we wish for, is similar. However, we also need to have the initiative and courage to make what changes for the better are possible.

Don Quixote said...

Well then, Niebuhr got it exactly right: “ … grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Those Twelve Steps, man … they’re like “Life for Dummies,” which I would think includes most of us :-)