To the Editor:
While I am neither a Religion major, nor even an active follower of a particular creed, I can't help feeling some nagging discomfort with Matthew Lubin's article. I can't help but remark that his heated rhetoric, righteous anger, and utterly prejudiced perspective would do any Bible-thumping preacher proud, as would the implications of his argument. We are plagued, these days, by a remarkable, pungent skepticism; remarkable because it comes from the right.
Perhaps we should consider the ground on which Lubin stands. If we looked at things from this vantage, any number of disciplines should be lined up from end to end and knocked off. Philosophy and Psychology, based on outmoded, discredited, often morally indefensible tropes, would drop first. Government would follow; what self-respecting anarchist could endorse the study of repressive, entrenched social and legal systems, hopelessly suffocating to natural human qualities? And Sociology tumbles by the same measure. Next to go are Literature, History, and Art, which simply collect irrelevant objects, riddle them with dogma, and hand them back as truth. In fact, we might as well junk the natural sciences which depend on Reason, a curiously artificial construction of Western culture, spurious categories, circumstantial evidence, and ideas about cause and effect which no one has believed since Heisenberg. This leaves us with the Republican version of the liberal education. One should after all, be responsible for one's own education, and not rely on biased entitlements of knowledge. Of course it would be hard to look things up in a library without categories, but why quibble about minor details? Some thought systems, like some fashions never go out of style.
