Reason crash
This is really tragic. Those poor sad deprived confined young people.
At Harvard these days, said Professor Gomes, the university preacher, “There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years.” Across the country, on secular campuses…chaplains, professors and administrators say students are drawn to religion and spirituality with more fervor than at any time they can remember…A survey on the spiritual lives of college students, the first of its kind, showed in 2004 that more than two-thirds of 112,000 freshmen surveyed said they prayed, and that almost 80 percent believed in God. Nearly half of the freshmen said they were seeking opportunities to grow spiritually…
That’s terrible. Almost 80 percent! Almost 80 percent of first year students can’t think straight. Well we knew US high schools are mostly not very good, but all the same, that’s pretty shocking.
Since 80% more or less matches religious surveys of the US in general, this figure is what we’d expect. Depressing, but not exactly shocking in the sense of surprising.
For what it’s worth, as a teenager a long time ago I was on a religious search, but I soon got over it, and that was without the likes of Dawkins et al generating plenty of well-publicised criticism.
Nor do I see much reason to expect schools, good or bad, to overthrow entrenched parental beliefs.
Actually, if “almost” 80% of incoming college students believe in God, that’s slightly below the U.S. national average. And religion majors at real schools (that is, ignore Liberty University, Bob Jones, Patrick Henry et al) are rarely believers, and even more rarely traditional believers. So this puff piece says exactly nothing of real interest or substance about whether or not young people are actually more religious in a meaningful sense. I’d put a lot more confidence in the survey data from responsible, careful sources like the Pew Foundation which show that current crop of young people are much more likely to be atheist/agnostic than any other age group.
More importantly, PUFF PIECE!! The New York Times becomes a more embarrassing spectacle of shoddy commercial journalism every time I turn around.
I should point out to those who are not at this moment residing in the U.S. and experiencing its cultural climate at first hand that said climate is definitely weirder and more dumbfounding, in many respects, than it has ever been in my lifetime.
The recent publications by Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and now, apparently, the great Hitch Himself have exploded like so many bombshells, and the pious folk, who have luxuriated all their lives in an atmosphere of nearly 100% (they thought) piety, suddenly are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, or at least chickens whose oxygen has been cut off and who are being forced to breath carbon dioxide.
When I was young, there were no publicly known atheists except for Ms. O’Hair, who IMHO was not the most clear-headed person around, and therefore was not too hard to dismiss. But now these damned secularists seem to be popping up everywhere, and some of them even seem to be making some sense! So of course, the pious are seized with panic, to the point that even a rock of Gibraltar like the august NY Times feels its old grey head spinning.
Now, apparently, the Wall Street Journal is about to become a part of the Murdoch empire (no antitrust objections will be forthcoming from our gracious government, I hear). I wouldn’t be surprised if the next step were that he sucked the Times into his enormous maw as well, and at that point the entire “mainstream media” would become be completely worthless. Well, I’ve long since ceased to take them seriously anyway.