Richard Rorty warned parents about the schools, teachers and attacks on Christians
The late American philosopher Richard Rorty described his assessment of the role of university professor wrote how professor approach their religious students.
“When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”
The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”
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Should it be surprising that Rorty explains the role of the school to destroy the relationship between student and parent.
“…we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”
“I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”
First Things chronicles a long biography of Rorty, pushing away from Leninism to discvoer that “Platonism appealed to Rorty because it ‘had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christinity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable.'”
Rorty reports that at the age of twenty, “I desperately wanted to be a Platonist ” to become one with the One, to fuse myself with Christ or God or the Platonic form of the Good or something like that. Pragmatism was a reaction formation.”
Rorty has devised something like a test of orthodoxy for churches in his postphilosophical and pragmatic America: “If a religious community has gay clergy and solemnizes gay marriage, it belongs to the constructive minority. If it preaches the social gospel, if the preachers remind the congregation that the richest country in the world at the richest point in its economic history still doesn’t feed its poor, then it also qualifies.” But the vast majority of Christian churches fail the test because they have kept “sex prominent in discussions of morality. It is hard to forgive them for this.” Rorty thinks that churches should teach that the greatest source of suffering is still, as always, economic inequality, not spiritual or bodily impurity.
Sources: Speak Up Movement
