Filling the Imagination

Only religion and secularism can do that.

The educational magic of diversity was experienced by me long before the term “diversity” became a cliche for describing getting students from different points of view to intersect on a campus. I was early in my freshman year at college when I met up with another freshman and he had prepared for college at a Catholic high school. When I said that I didn’t believe in anything, he said with considerable anger that everyone has to believe in something and so the only question is what people agree to that is based on faith rather than scientific truth. And, yes, it was true that I believed that humankind was engaged in a road to progress and that knowledge would make us free, but what I meant was that I did not subscribe to any supernatural belief, one beyond the tests of factual or conceptual truths where one might make an educated inference. I could believe that ethical life was important without claiming that ethics were a sacrosanct or holy entity the equivalent of religious belief, such claims by definition to be beyond reason, such as the Virgin Birth or God parting the Red Sea. So, there.

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