Sunday, March 9, 2008

A pragmatic empiricism

According to Thomas Clark the society has to refrain from characterising itself by any epistemological belief or abide by any particular religion and in so doing maintain an environment where everyone can freely worship and belief what they want to. The same applies for policies, laws and rules that apply to communities and areas of the public including schools, universities etc. This is maintained by public schools not offering religious classes of any kind or particular doctrine so as not to put undue pressure on its students as to what way to abide.
Then i pose the question of why then do we teach science like evolution in public schools wherein some people might object to that version of the origin of the world? If we make the argument that we have to expose the students to this scientific belief without any bias towards others or without necessarily asking students to question their faith and the knowledge of God creating the universe then we can make the same argument for religious classes.
Why not teach history classes with the Bible as the text or better yet why not teach Islam to students from a historical perspective of the Mohammed's life, the jihads and the consequent segregation of Islamic followers or matter of fact we could just allow anyone with the authority to hold seminars or classes about whatever religious or epistemological belief they see fit as long as they have a certain number of interested parties?
It will just be an extension of the real world empiricism maintained by catholic schools and other religious-affiliated schools in society!

1 comment:

David K. Braden-Johnson said...

The fact that no one, Clark included, would stand for such practices, suggests that his "middle-ground" is actually a concealed version of naturalism.