This just goes to show how religionist civil libertarians and secularist
civil libertarians talk past each other. The latter are more
concerned about
the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the former are more
concerned with the free exercise clause. When the two clauses don't
conflict
you get the ACLU and the ACLJ being on the same side of the Bong Hits 4
Jesus case. The NY Times played this as a schism between the
Religious Right
and the Bush Administration along with Ken Starr. In reality, it was
just
the Religious Right being worried about unpopular speech -- anything
religious qualifies here -- in the public school. Even though Jay
Sekulow
would have nothing to do with the message of the public banner, he fears
that Christian students' free speech rights would be next if the school
system and the Bush Administration prevailed.
Another area of misunderstanding is the meaning of the term "critical
thinking". For the secular scientist, this meaning involves the
technical
meaning of critical coming from the Greek root kritw which means to
judge.
The religious angle of this term is to be counter-cultural and not
just buy
into the establishment group think which includes the secular scientific
"elites". This popular sense is epitomized by the perennial
complaint of
teenagers: "stop being critical of me".
This is a gentle reminder to Pim and the Panda's Thumb crowd. Please
tone
down your condescension here. It will only underscore fears of religious
oppression amongst conservative Christians and does not advance the
debate.
The teacher probably deserved to be sacked but you will end up making a
martyr out of him instead.
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Mar 20 17:23:56 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Mar 20 2007 - 17:23:56 EDT