Cabot Phillips writes:
"This Tuesday, President Donald Trump will give his first State Of The Union address to the nation.
Critics of Trump have already begun to express displeasure with his actions in the days leading up to the speech, leading some to wonder whether this opposition is substantive, or rooted in a distaste of Trump as a person.
Wanting to find out, Campus Reform headed to New York University to ask students their opinions of President Trump’s State of the Union. The only problem for them was that the speech would not take place for another seven days…
Would that stop them from giving strong, condemnatory opinions on the speech?
See for yourself."
Watch the video and witness the herd mentality which is representative of many of today's college students.
Philip Johnson, in his book "Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture, tells a story which is both amusing and frightening at the same time. He writes: "I am convinced that conscious dishonesty is much less important in intellectual matters than self-deception...The German biologist Bruno Muller-Hill tells a memorable story to illustrate his thesis that 'self-deception plays an astonishing role in science in spite of all the scientists' worship of truth':
When I was a student in a German gymnasium and thirteen years old, I learned a lesson that I have not forgotten...One early morning our physics teacher placed a telescope in the school yard to show us a certain planet and its moons. So we stood in a long line, about forty of us. I was standing at the end of the line, since I was one of the smallest students. The teacher asked the first student whether he could see the planet. No, he had difficulties, because he was nearsighted. The teacher showed him how to adjust the focus, and that student could finally see the planet and the moons. Others had no difficulty; they saw them right away. The students saw, after a while, what they were supposed to see. Then the student standing just before me - his name was Harter - announced that he could not see anything. 'You idiot,' shouted the teacher, 'you have to adjust the lenses.' The student did that and said after a while, 'I do not see anything, it is all black.' The teacher then looked through the telescope himself. After some seconds he looked up with a strange expression on his face. And then my comrades and I also saw that the telescope was nonfunctioning; it was closed by a cover over the lens. Indeed, no one could see anything through it.'
Muller-Hill reports that one of the docile students became a professor of philosophy and director of a German TV station. 'This might be expected,' he wickedly comments. But another became a professor of physics, and a third a professor of botany. The honest Harter had to leave school and go to work in a factory. If in later life he was ever tempted to question any of the pronouncements of his more illustrious classmates, I am sure he was firmly told not to meddle in matters beyond his understanding.'" (pp. 156-157).
Do we honestly believe that this herd mentality is not to be found throughout our society and even in the Church? If so, we deceive ourselves. Pope Benedict XVI has warned of a liberal notion of conscience which is nothing less than a retreat from truth. In a keynote address of the Tenth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Catholic Conscience: Foundation and Formation," he says that liberalism's idea of conscience is that: "Conscience does not open the way to the redemptive road to truth - which either does not exist or, if it does, is too demanding. It is the faculty that dispenses with truth. It thereby becomes the justification for subjectivity, which would not like to have itself called into question. Similarly, it becomes the justification for social conformity. As mediating value between the different subjectivities, social conformity is intended to make living together possible. The obligation to seek the truth terminates, as do any doubts about the general inclination of society and what it has become accustomed to. Being convinced of oneself, as well as conforming to others, is sufficient. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he has, the better for him."
Is there really any difference between Harter's classmates, who insisted that they could see a planet and its moons when such was impossible, and those who succumb to social conformity and insist that an unborn baby is not really a human being when all the scientific evidence suggests otherwise?
Are today's college students being prepared to think critically or simply to mindlessly regurgitate what their far-left liberal professors tell them to believe and/or what the far-left mainstream media reports?
What do you think?
Related reading: here.
1 comment:
If these students represent the future, it's game over. They're idiots.
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