A Quote by Jane Smiley
Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.
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I think a liberal arts education isn't necessarily about doing something with your degree; it's about becoming a critical thinker. And I think that critical thinking is so integral to being an actor.
FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It’s the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It’s a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it’s one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong.
To even win a nomination in this country, you have to say you're a person of great faith. You have to pledge to the people out there that you put your faith in things that are unable to be proven - that you suspend critical thinking as the way to go.
We have to start with the little babies who are born now, socialize them in freedom and critical thinking. We don't have to throw away their faith. People confuse the two, thinking if you are enlightened that means apostasy. It doesn't.
The most fundamental attack on freedom is the attack on critical thinking skills. Comments display our universal failure to teach and value critical thinking, leaving the possibility open that both everything and nothing could be true.
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.
In some of the classes, especially the introductory religion courses I took, the professors can veer into a particular strain of religious anti-intellectualism. Professors typically aren't given tenure at Liberty, so there's pressure to hew to the party line on religious and social issues. I didn't see a whole lot of my professors encouraging critical thinking among their students. Which isn't to say that students don't engage critical thinking skills at Liberty - just that it wasn't part of my classroom experience there.
I think the press, by and large, is what we call "liberal". But of course what we call "liberal" means well to the right. "Liberal" means the "guardians of the gates". So the New York Times is "liberal" by, what's called, the standards of political discourse, New York Times is liberal, CBS is liberal. I don't disagree. I think they're moderately critical at the fringes. They're not totally subordinate to power, but they are very strict in how far you can go. And in fact, their liberalism serves an extremely important function in supporting power.
Faith means the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. It’s nothing to be admired.
If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.
A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.
No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one.
Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren't true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith's claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The "constructive dialogue" between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monologue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process.
In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.
Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.
There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges.
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