Academic Biases

Religion News Service reports that college graduates are more likely to consider the Ten Commandments irrelevant than those with no college degree, according to a recent study. They are also more likely to reject the Bible as the word of God. A "distinct shift" occurs after college regarding beliefs and opinion, said Richard Brake, director of university studies at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The ISI surveyed 2,508 Americans on questions intended to measure the impact of a college degree on people's beliefs. The study also found that people with college degrees were more likely to support same-sex marriage, as well as abortion available at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason. Graduates were also more likely to believe that public school teachers should not be allowed to lead prayers in schools. The shift may be attributed to the unpopularity of strong religious views in academia, Brake said. "I think one of the reasons you see this shift is the people that work in academia share these same views," he said.

Kent comments:

While it was nice of ISI (a good and useful organization, visit their website to see what they offer), the study only confirms what anyone who ‘hangs around’ campus these days knows from talking to students.  While the situation will vary from campus to campus and even among departments on a given campus, you can expect a solid majority of academia to hold views that are:

1. Opposed to historic Christianity in some degree or other

2. In favor of almost any statist program or policy you can imagine

3. In favor of ‘ethics’ but in the end unable to decide on the content thereof, yielding some version of moral relativism

While this list could become longer and more precise, these are a few of the main points I have noticed.  From my experience, these points and others like them are more likely to be represented more strongly in departments of education and some of the ‘social sciences’ – especially fields like sociology.  Next to or perhaps tied with departments of education in the matter will be religion and philosophy.  (One of the most anti-Christian departments at many universities is, ironically, the ‘religion’ department.)

Naturally, these views get passed along to many students to some extent.  There are always strong exceptions among students – the sharp, independent thinkers sometimes go against the grain.  But most students are usually sucked into a system where the assumptions of academia have tacitly set the terms of discussion in a way that excludes the truth of the Christian faith, assumes the value of some version of statism, and will tolerate no version of ‘intolerant’ ethical absolutism.

It is not that those who lead academia always make a point of drilling these things into the heads of students.  I have seen examples of that, but it is not the usual approach.  Instead, alternatives to current academic orthodoxy are simply never given serious consideration in the discussion.

I have seen small pockets here and there of exceptions to this situation, but they are isolated.

As long as academia remains what it generally is today, we can reasonably expect those who spend time there to absorb these views to some extent.  That means that ‘higher education’ will produce anti-religious, pro-statist, moral relativists.

This will be interpreted to mean that ‘education’ reveals these positions to be true.  What it in fact shows is the nature and extent of the biases that currently infect academia.

If we ever hope to change the downward spiral of our culture, we will need to change the very fabric of academia.  This will not be done easily or quickly.  But in the long run, this is much more important than anything else that could be done to save our civilization.

The BIG Question

A recent, excellent little piece at Christianity Today online is titled “We’re All Theologians.”  The article ends with a quote from Joshua Harris, “We're all theologians. The question is whether what we know about God is true.”

Strictly speaking, we cannot know what is not true.  So I would tweak that last sentence of the quote to read, “The question is whether what we ‘know’ about God is true.”

Small points aside, that is the question of the year, of the decade, of the century, or the millennium, and even (and especially) of eternity.  Everything that is anything hinges on that question, and that question alone.

That is why the attack that our culture has mounted to blunt that question is so ingenious, so serious, so devious, and so very sinister.  Our culture has propagated the biggest lie of all, the lie that says, “We cannot be sure what ‘true’ means.”

If you can convince people to be unsure of the nature and existence of truth, that question-of-questions can appear to melt down and flow through the cracks of life, never to disturb us again.  I say ‘appear’ because it never goes away – we just become more comfortable ignoring it.

 

Dear Mr. Madison . . .

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." --James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, 1792

Kent comments:

If I could bring Mr. Madison back for questions (wouldn’t that be fun!) I would ask in response to the above, “You mean like the one we have now?”

Sometimes when I read history I get a bit upset with the Founders.  I start to think that they did not make the fact of limited, enumerated powers clear enough in our Constitution.  I start to muse about how they could have made the matter more clear.

I do that in light of the fact that almost no one from any party today really believes that the powers of Congress are limited by their enumeration in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.  That one clause of the Preamble - ‘promote the general welfare’ – is taken to mean that all bets are off for whatever might come in the body of the Constitution.  Congress, it is often said, can do anything it thinks proper to promote ‘welfare’ – whatever that might be.

As Mr. Madison says above, this effectively gives Congress political omnipotence.

So I often wonder why the Founders didn’t, for example, add a clause to the Preamble saying, “This is just an introduction to the overall purpose of this document.  The allowable means to these ends is stated in the body of the document.”

Well, (I answer myself) for one thing, that would make the Constitution sound stupid.

Then I remind myself that pieces of paper can never hinder people from anything.  When people no longer wish to abide by the terms of the Constitution, they will not.  It’s not just those evil politicians in Washington who are to blame for trashing the Constitution.  (There is plenty of blame for them, of course.)  Most Americans want what they want.  Many of them have no idea what the Constitution says.  Many more of them do not care what it says.

Constitutions are no barrier to tyrants unless a significant number of the people understand liberty and love it.  In our situation, you can certainly expect to get what we’ve got.

Totalitarian ‘Gays’

D.C. Catholic Charities Drops Spousal Benefits in Gay Marriage Dispute

Religion News Service reports that the Archdiocese of Washington's social service branch will stop offering benefits to spouses of new employees. The move is an attempt to balance the District of Columbia's new same-sex marriage law with Catholic opposition to homosexuality. Edward Orzechowski, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of Washington, informed the group's 850 employees of the change in a letter on Monday, two days before gay marriage is scheduled to become legal in the city. "We sincerely regret that we have to make this change," said Orzechowski, "but it is necessary to allow Catholic Charities to continue to provide essential services to the clients we serve in partnership with the District of Columbia while remaining consistent with the tenets of our religious faith."

Kent comments:

It was a case of let’s-make-‘gay’-legal vs. a group’s religious principles.  And as many suspected would happen, religious principles lost.  (‘Gay’ used to mean ‘care free’ – didn’t it?)

I, for one, do not want to make homosexuality (assuming it’s between consenting adults) illegal.  I live in a state where the practice used to be prohibited by law.  I was not completely comfortable with that idea.  Several years ago I told a state legislator friend of mine what I thought about that.

He urged me to reconsider.  He predicted that without a law against homosexuality, homosexual activists would use that situation as an opening to push for ‘gay’ friendly school curricula, even homosexual ‘marriage’ and many other such things.  I was not completely convinced, but that was a long time ago.

I’m still not convinced that legal penalties for homosexual practice are a good idea.  But I must say that the ‘homo’ lobby makes it ever more difficult for me to maintain my composure on this matter.  Not content with legal tolerance, the open, active ‘gay’ crowd demands ever more legal approval of their vile behavior.

It is vile.  But vileness alone is still not enough to put someone in jail or worse.  Homosexuality is the kind of behavior best dealt with by social, not legal means.  Christians individually and together as the church should proclaim the fact that it is wrong.  This means that we, at a social level, should warn people of its dangers.  We should counsel people to avoid it, and try to help them do so.  We should call on people to repent of it.

And when some insist on practicing homosexuality openly, we should disassociate ourselves from them.  A religious group that refuses to pay benefits to a homosexual ‘spouse’ is doing just that.

When the law now requires that a religious group violate its own principles in this regard, the religious free exercise clause of the First Amendment has become a joke.  You might say that it has been sacrificed on the alter of the activist homosexual agenda.

I would prefer an open society on matters such as this.  That would mean people are free to practice homosexuality, while the rest of us are free to discourage its practice in peaceful, social ways.  But if the homosexual activists are going to infringe upon my freedom to disapprove of their practice, they should not be surprised to find their freedom in jeopardy also.

By the way, don’t be surprised if very soon, groups like Catholic Social Services are forced to pay for their employee’s abortions.  Oh, wait – I think that’s called ObamaCare!

Three – or more – Cheers for Jim Bunning!!!

Reporting on Republican Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning blocking spending legislation over deficit concerns at the top of Tuesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith proclaimed: "Congressional quagmire. Democrats blame one Republican senator for preventing thousands of federal workers from working."

In a later report, White House correspondent Chip Reid continued to assail Bunning: "The White House is pointing its finger at a single Republican senator who they say is standing in the way of federal aid for hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans....he is single-handedly holding up a routine piece of legislation."

Kent Comments:

On Monday morning I called Jim Bunning’s Washington office.  I wanted to thank him for his willingness to stand up to the big-government-should-be-routine that is now just expected in Congress.

The fellow who answered the phone was very polite, but he seemed fatigued.  “I bet you haven’t received many calls like mine today.”  He assured me he had not.

Mr. Bunning is just about finished with his Senate term.  While he is not completely free from the influence of the big-Republican machine, he has often voted in generally liberty-increasing ways, both in the Senate and when he was in the House of Representatives from our district.

I was very proud to have Mr. Bunning as MY Senator as he refused to go along with the no-debate ‘unanimous consent’ route to a few more billions of government spending.  Yes, it was a small thing in the big picture of really big government under which we now suffer.  But the symbolism was heroic and wonderful.

If I were you, I would not be worrying about some federal bureaucrats who had a few days off work.  (We would be much better off if many of the feds found private employment.)  I would be wondering why more members of the Senate have not done what Bunning did more often.

Bully for you, Mr. Bunning.  Good job.  Well done.  Do it some more of the same in what is left of your term.

No Laughing Matter – the Laffer Curve

[excerpts from Some Thoughts on Supply-side Economics, by Richard M. Ebeling from Mises Daily]

An additional ingredient in the tool kit of some "supply-side" theoreticians, however, is the concept of the "Laffer Curve," named after Arthur Laffer, a USC economist.

Laffer argues that there are two possible tax rates that will generate the same level of government revenue. If taxes are zero, government revenue is zero and the people retain 100 percent of their income. If taxes are l00 percent, government revenue would again be zero because, Laffer says, nobody would bother to work if they were not allowed to keep any of what they had earned and produced.

If the rate of taxation is lowered from l00 percent, individuals would have an incentive to work, since they could now keep some of what they had produced and government revenue would rise from zero to some positive number. Every lowering of the tax rate would continue to induce more and productivity, with greater government revenue besides.

Greater government revenue, that is, until some point at which any further lowering of the tax rate would, in fact, generate less of a government take rather than more. Hence, the "Laffer Curve" . . .

But even more important than the theoretical difficulties of determining the position and shape of "The Curve" is the assumption that the goal of fiscal policy should be the maximizing of governmental revenues.

Kent comments:

This little survey of so-called supply-side economics is worth reading in full.  This is the view that some derisively refer to as ‘trickle down’ economics.  What these critics would prefer, because they are statists of some sort, is that those who have anything be taxed as much as possible so that the state will have more to redistribute.  In their view, only the state has the wisdom and fair-mindedness to distribute wealth ‘properly.’

If you love freedom, you naturally oppose this whole idea.

But as Ebeling points out in the article above, the proponents of the ‘other’ view have a very similar problem.  This is especially ironic because they are typically self-professed conservatives of some stripe who claim to be opponents of ‘big government.’

I have no doubt that some of them are in many ways.  Perhaps they have just not considered this matter carefully.  For examples, you can often hear radio talk show folks like Rush Limbaugh extol the virtues of the Laffer curve.  They often argue for lower tax rates based in part on the idea that it will, in fact, generate more revenue for governments.

I always want to ask (but I refuse to spend enough time on hold to do so):  “Exactly why would conservatives every want to generate more revenue for any government?”  And I want to ask this poignant question in a very loud and forceful voice!

If a conservative is someone who wants to conserve individual liberty, the goal should be to keep governments on a very (very) strict diet.  When fed very much, they always grow from helpful servants to horrible masters – which make us their slaves!  Those who love liberty should never give as a reason for anything the thought that it might supply more revenue to governments.

Governments always tend to spend at least as much as they collect, and almost (?) always much, much more than that.  Revenue to government is power to government, because almost anything governments do beyond discouraging us from murdering one another and stealing from one another will result in less liberty.  My desire is just enough government to preserve liberty, and no more.

So even if Laffer is right, I for one do NOT want to implement policies that take advantage of his ‘curve.’  I don’t want governments to have more revenue, because I don’t want governments to have the power to do very much – which is usually too much.

Regulated Freedom?

from: Breakpoint with Chuck Colson

Hope for Health Care Reform
What We Can Do

March 1, 2010

“On the one side, the Democrats seem intent on reform through increasing government’s role in health care. The Republicans, on the other side, are firm in their belief that reform should come through better regulated free markets.”

Kent comments:

This illustrates perfectly the problem with many Republicans, and many Christians who think about political economy.  I admire Mr. Colson for much of his work.  He is, no doubt, a much smarter guy than I will ever be.

But the phrase ‘better regulated free markets’ is just so much non-sense.

A regulated market is not free.  A free market cannot be regulated and remain free.  The lack of economic freedom is the root cause of 90% of most economic problems.

People who are free to work, produce, give, trade, save, invest, etc. as they wish will almost always have most of the things they wish to consume.  It’s not a perfect system.  It’s not a ‘system’ at all.  It’s freedom.

And if you try to ‘regulate’ freedom, of necessity, you must destroy it.