Religion on Campus

Fundamentalism and education have always been at odds. Fundamentalism, by definition, takes one perspective and filters all other ideas through that single lens. The Nazis or the Taliban, the Khmer Rouge or the Christian Coalition, they take a single-minded narcissistic vision of the world and use it as a tool of domination to unite their followers in unthinking self-congratulation while projecting all their inner conflicts outward against straw-man enemies.

The real enemy of these cults is education. Education is considered an absolute good in most of the world, but not in fundamentalist states. You could not claim life in the Soviet Union was better and richer than that in other countries unless you either had no information about other countries, or only visited them with blinders and filters on your eyes and ears. Fundamentalists believe 'education' is the application of these filters and blinders.

Often the beginning of a true education is the uncomfortable disillusioning of infantile fantasies about the world and one's central position in it. Education broadens one's perspective to include other points of view even as it encourages one to question for oneself all received knowledge. This is unsettling to the individual, which is why colleges and universities are isolated from the world a little like a sanitorium.

It's one thing for an eighteen-year-old to think his father has his head up his ass about the way the world works, and quite another for his college professor to teach things that prove it. The normal response is to want to kill the messenger. This is frowned upon in academia and elsewhere, (except in the chambers of the Supreme Court where Clarence Thomas had a poster about striking a blow for freedom by bombing Yale- he said it was just a joke- ha, ha.)

A student with such a feeling has two choices: leave the college where he or she is trying to get a liberal education (yes, liberal - hence the term Liberal Arts degree), or learn to use the thinking tools of academia, tools that students will be unskilled at using at first while their professors will be experts, and so their professors' ideas will dominate the discourse well into graduate school. This is a proper running of the system.

Unfortunately for Fundamentalists, their sons and daughters quickly learn skills of logic in college that knock over the one-legged stool their faith perches on. The solution is to attack the institutions of higher learning and pass bills making it illegal to suggest a more stable stool might have two, three, even four legs. My office chair rolls on six casters. Very stable. I can roll in any direction I want. This is anathema to the Christian Coalition, so they are innoculating their young against college. Check out the logic-busting indoctination at probe.org where there is a Student Mind Games Conference. A recent attendee lauds the program because:

"I had no idea what to expect except from what Jerry Solomon had portrayed for the juniors and seniors at my high school. He acted as a professor from a large university who was adamant about his dislike for Christianity. The professor allowed no one to ask him questions because he was the one asking the questions. "

Mind games, indeed.