Recently I was reading a website run by an ex-Evangelical turned atheist. He left his faith because of reading critical scholarship about the Scriptures. Anyways, he’s big on education. That’s his thing, the more education that you have, the less you’ll believe. I’ve actually thought about this for years. If you have more education, will you be more secular? If so, is this a black eye for religiosity?
It’s not unknown that most academics in the West are atheists. Even if you’re a graduate student you’re less likely to be religious than an undergrad, and an undergrad is likely to be less religious than the general public. I remember reading once that if you go to the parking lot of a grocery store and throw a rock at a random car, the odds are that the owner of the car will believe in God. However, if you go into a parking lot of University professors, you’ll have to have pretty good aim to hit the car of a believer.
This is something that proud atheists like to flaunt. We’re educated while you religious peasants are uneducated. There is a presupposition that most people seem to miss at this point.
If you were to go back to the 1200’s a visit rural France and stumble across a village, the only person in the village who would have been able to read and write was the local priest. He would have been the most educated person in the town and by obvious choice of vocation, the most religious. A little hole in the theory. Also, the centres of education at that time would have been the monasteries. That priest would most likely received his education from the monastery.
In the same time period, the medieval Inquisition was started by Pope Gregory IX. The people put in charge of the Inquisition were the Dominicans. Why were they put in charge? The answer is because they were the most educated. Only they could run this vast tribal which required a vast amount of knowledge. They were trained at monasteries as well.
Eventually education shifted from the monasteries to universities. However, universities were founded to do the same things that monasteries were. They were founded to educated priests and nuns.
I think now you know the difference. The education of the 1200’s is very different from modern education. Education from the 1200’s had religious presuppositions and foundations. Modern education has secular and anti-religious foundations.
Evolutionists like to say that no creationists aren’t published in academic journals. Well, when one realizes that these journals are run and controlled by evolutionists who don’t accept anything else, the argument is less impressive.
The blogger that I referenced above mentioned that a good way to counter religiosity in the developing world is to provide them with education. Well, that would certainly work since modern Western education is anti-religious. If he were alive in the 1200’s he would not have been saying that. The truth is that he would probably not have had an education himself; at least not a “proper” one.
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