Given that evangelical is synonymous with believing something that is demonstrably false, I don't see why we should be clamoring to include such people among those that will shape the way future generations think. Just because US Republicans are underrepresented or discriminated against does not mean that universities are not doing a good job of maintaining a diverse faculty. It could be argued (and has, many times over) that the spectrum between the Marxist and American Democratic parties is much more representative of the rest of the world's liberal-to-conservative spectrum than would be the US definition of liberal and conservative. Additionally, I would expect libertarians to be much better represented among faculty since their ideology is, at least, logically consistent and doesn't contain the hate/discrimination endemic to the Republican platform.
I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. Even if you put aside how odious and xenophobic what Trump has proposed, it's basically impossible to implement any of it anyways and anyone with an ounce of critical reasoning skills would easily realize that. And the one area where colleges cannot compromise on the faculty is in the area of critical reasoning skills. More than anything else, the purpose of a college education is to learn critical reasoning skills.
GP didn't say (or imply) that Trump is an evangelical; there was an implication in that post that lack of critical reasoning, which is a trait GP also ascribes to evangelicals, among the Republican electorate was a factor in Trump's success, though.
> I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought.
While Donald Trump has blown up the entire conservative base this year, this is fundamentally untrue.
Read through the Growth and Opportunity project, written by key conservatives in 2012. http://goproject.gop.com/
There is a LOT of depth and understanding here that liberals miss out all the time. True, conservatives have blind spots in their policies. But liberals have blind spots all the same.
And when you read good reports like the Growth and Opportunity Project, you start seeing the benefits of conservative thought. Conservatives are very local and have trust in the smallest, closest government to them. (So much so, they wish to remove powers from the Federal government to "give back to the States"). In part, its because local government is where the GOP and conservative values functions best.
In particular, I found the chapter on Campaign Finance to be intriguing, because online you normally only see people who are against Citizens United. But you can see that the true conservative argument is far more nuanced and comes from a completely different perspective.
I didn't say that the Republican platform lacks basic critical thought, I said that Donald Trump's platform lacks basic critical thought.
The wall is the best example. He wants to build a massive wall that will cost tens of billions of dollars. That wall ignores the fact that almost all illegal immigration comes from visa overstays rather than people walking across the border. And the wall would still be relatively easy to get over without someone guarding it.
Last Week Tonight, a comedy show, did a pretty thorough dismantling [1] of the logic behind building it. Scientists, Engineers and Immigration officials would have an even easier time arguing against it. It's just a really stupid idea that he probably came up with watching Game of Thrones (Mexicans == Wildlings) and yet he's used it to help win the Republican nomination.
I don't live in the USA, could someone briefly explain why an evangelical Christian would fit in less well at a university than a religious person of other faiths?
Is it related to their religion, their conservatism, or something else?
Currently it is because a large part of the Republican party consists of what we call the "religious right", a group that seeks to make political change based on what they believe to be religious truth, or morality. Ted Cruz was the arbiter of this ideology in the Republican primaries, until he dropped out last week. While this group does not represent the entire party, they are definitely the most vocal, and many liberals conflate that group with the rest of the party as a whole. This belief is not helped by the fact that many "core" republican platforms come from religious conservatives, like outlawing gay marriage and abortion.
Many people who belong to the academic community consider these people to be a bunch of uneducated backwater hicks who do not belong in intellectual conversations based on logical thought. So when an intellectual states that they are an evangelical christian, many consider them to be flawed in some capacity, and thus have nothing of substance to contribute.
EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible; in that the world was created in literally seven days, and that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, a story which in its literal translation is of course not supported by science. So when a person who professes to follow science also professes to be a member of this faith, it can seem paradoxical to many.
To the person that asked the question, headcanon's first paragraph is pretty much right on and answers the question. The downvotes likely came from the tribalism expressed in the second paragraph ("uneducated backwater hicks"). American politics are way too polarized. IMO that polarization comes from two sources: (1) demagogues like Cruz and Trump who lure people in by convincing them that they are the "true" Americans, and making them believe that everything would be so much better were it not for the pernicious influence of some other group (Democrats/scientists/LGBT folks/academics/Muslims/Mexicans/etc.). The very best fuel for this fire is (2), being denigrated by people who self-identify as one of those groups that the demagogues are trying to make them scared of.
Like, imagine some perfectly decent person who has lived all his life in some small town in Nebraska, who isn't very educated but also isn't a terrible person who goes around looking for excuses to hate people. Rural voters are statistically more religious and more conservative, so he probably has extra peer pressure to be like that himself, but at the same time is a little creeped out by people like Cruz who seem to be trying to convince him that atheist non-white city dwellers think that him and his family and friends are subhuman, and are trying to take away his rights and his livelihood. So he's on the fence, until one day he stumbles across someone complaining about "uneducated backwater hicks", at which point he decides that Cruz might be right after all, because clearly these college-educated urban strangers really do hate him and his friends and relatives.
It's a vicious circle that's only broken when people just suck it up and take the high road, but it feels like there's just never quite enough people willing to do that to make a difference. It's easy to judge less educated or less successful people, and I'm sure it feels really cathartic to do so. Especially when many of those people are being used as pawns by demagogues who are actively trying to roll back civilization. It's much harder to turn the other cheek and try to find common ground with them. Sadly that's the only way the trend towards cultural polarization is ever going to reverse, because neither side is going anyplace.
I probably should have tossed "uneducated backwater hicks" in quotes - I was attempting to speak from what I perceive to be the left-wing point of view. But you are right, the social tribalism is driving a lot of this. I live in a very liberal university town, and many people seem to see republicans this way.
> EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible
Actually, plenty of Evangelicals I've seen have cited strict literalism as one of the problems in Fundamentalism that Evangelicalism reacted against; while Evangelicals are more likely to view any particular part of the Bible as intended literally than are Christians who are neither Evangelical or Fundamentalist, there are plenty of Evangelicals who don't hold that the Bible is, cover to cover, intended literally.
a lot of people in the US. are christian but pretty moderate. they don't really think about it much or let it affect their behavior. And they believe in stuff like evolution. Evangelicals are fundamentalists. For a lot of evangelicals, religion is a central part of their life and motivates almost all their beliefs.
Ok, but what dies that mean in practice? Does this mean I will receive a worse education from an evangelical professor? Should we check our surgeon's faith and political party preference because there is a higher chance of complication from being operated upon by a conservative evangelic surgeon as opposed to an agnostic liberal one?
If the orientation or race of these people is irrelevant to them performing their duties, why is faith or political leaning relevant?
maybe. I had a teacher in middle school who was very religious and decided to skip the evolution chapter because "we didn't have time".
It is almost never irrelevant. You know what George Bush said about Putin when he met him? He said he could tell that he was a great guy because he was wearing his grandmother's cross. If the leader of the free world can be tricked so easily because of his faith it is an issue. Especially when we know Putin hasn't worn the cross before or after. He figured that is all it took to fool the leader of the free world.
No, they aren't. The Evangelical movement was a reaction against elements of the Fundamentalist movement in much the same way that the Fundamentalist movement was a reaction against liberal/modernist Christianity, and explicitly saw itself as between the two. (It covers, in practice, a wide range, and obviously the more exclusionary, more nearly Fundamentalist edge of the Evangelical community has the most visibility in media, which tends to be conflict-oriented, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that the tarnishing and genericization of the "fundamentalist" label has probably led to actual Fundamentalists grabbing on to the Evangelical label without the substance.)
He is saying they are fundamentalists with a lower case f. They can still be less fundamentalist than a group literally called Fundamentalists and still be fairly fundamentalist.
> I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I'm not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.
Which is still not true as a generalization by any meaningful definition of "fundamentalist". The Evangelical movement was precisely a reaction against the elements of the Fundamentalist movement that made "fundamentalist" a generic term of zealous, narrow-minded extremists.
"Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself. (for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)"
A variety of groups consider themselves to be evangelical but the group that tends to get the most media coverage tend to be the most conservative and are anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, don't believe in evolution, and think the USA should be a Christian nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism#Recurrent_theme...
Some false equivalency in this article:
"Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian and famed geneticist who has led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health. And if you’re saying that conservatives may be tolerable, but evangelical Christians aren’t — well, are you really saying you would have discriminated against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.?
"
MLK Jr ≠ Francis Collins. Collins argues that DNA is the language of god which there's no empirical evidence to which. Plus, he's respected despite this, in his field. That seems like acceptance.
Also the article lists:
"But that doesn’t explain why there are conservative math professors but not many right-wing anthropologists."
I imagine that say, in the extreme cases of say: evangelical young earth creationists or a evangelical mormon believing that humans are 5000 years old or that Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel is counterproductive.
That "DNA is the language of God" quote is somewhat taken out of context: Collins was speaking metaphorically. The point of his writing is that Christianity and science are completely compatible.
Religious thinking may be compatible with science to the extent that religion is only used as some kind of motivating factor and doesn't affect the outcome or logic of the resulting science. However religion used instead to push an agenda, influencing the outcome of research, would seem counter-productive, and I can understand the wariness of social social scientists towards those with rigid beliefs.
You can't choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs. For that reason alone, I think statements like
"My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination."
miss the mark. Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them. The feelings of the author (and me, and a lot of others besides) is that staunch liberals in academia might be flawed in excluding conservatives. But not because it's akin to racism, it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
good point. you can replace conservative with any other set of beliefs and see how absurd that statement is. I am not equating conservatives to the following groups but imagine if it said "....holocaust denying scholars.." instead.
the saddest part is how it equates war victims and trafficked children to conservative scholars.
What you believe to be true and false can (and probably ought) be based on what you've observed, experienced and researched. Beliefs must be periodically challenged or they're merely blind faith. And that way lies madness.
This means your beliefs ought to be malleable. And when they don't change after evaluation you ought to have a reason for it. Even if it's just: No new evidence, evaluate later.
Uhhh, what? Fundamentally belief is the acceptance in an idea as true or real. It represents the amount of confidence you have in what is presented to you. Confidence can be based on many things (evidence, social pressure, etc) and can change over time. So you are absolutely free to choose what you believe is true or false.
That doesn't make any sense: I don't choose to have confidence that something is true; I either have confidence that it is true; have confidence that it is false; or do not have sufficient confidence to know either way. I can't choose whether I believe something is true or false, any more than I can choose to wake up an aardvark tomorrow.
I think the reality is – we do have some limited degree of choice in our beliefs. For example, I can choose what books I read. If I choose to read two dozen apologies for Marxism, that is not guaranteed to make me believe in Marxism, but it almost certainly increases somewhat the probability I will end up believing in it compared to if I hadn't chosen to read all those books. (Substitute for Marxism any other belief system – Islam, atheism, Christianity, whatever – and the point still holds.) At the same time, I can't wake up tomorrow morning and decide out of the blue "I'm going to believe in Marxism today". Beliefs are ingrained habits of the mind – we have some conscious power over our own habits, but it requires a desire to change them, and a willingness to make concerted efforts over time to change them, and even after all of that there is no guarantee of success. (It's unusual for people to actually want to change their beliefs, but not completely unheard of; while most atheists are quite happy to remain atheists, some of them actually do want to believe in God, but can't; some of those try to make themselves believe it; many of those who try fail, but I'm sure some of them actually do succeed.) In most cases when people change their beliefs, it happens without any conscious effort to do so–the ideal of rationality says on the basis of new evidence or better arguments; however, given the reality of human non-rationality, I'd say that social and emotional factors are often more important in changing beliefs than rational or evidential ones.
Now, when it comes to the actual topic at hand – political liberalism vs. political conservatism – I don't think the vast majority of people's political beliefs are the result of a conscious choice to believe one thing rather than another – they are primarily the consequences of social and emotional and personality factors (reason and evidence do play a role, but far less than either side would like to think.) While in theory a person could consciously choose to try to make themselves believe in a particular political ideology, I doubt many people ever actually make that choice in practice.
> Confidence can be based on many things (evidence, social pressure, etc) and can change over time. So you are absolutely free to choose what you believe is true or false.
No, The second doesn't follow from the first. Sure, confidence can change over time. That doesn't mean that you can make a conscious choice to believe something. (With skill, you may be able to identify the factors that influence your belief and then chose behaviors which will lead to experiencing the factors that will influence your belief in the direction you wish, but its absolutely not directly and simply within your control, even before considering that a belief that something is true itself generally precludes the belief that you should believe that it is not true in the first place.)
At a base level, you could assert that none of us can "choose" anything and the universe is entirely deterministic, or it's at least deterministic at any level which affects us.
In practice, you're generally able to read as much as you want, talk to as many people as you want, and choose who you care about and what issues are important to you. A person's beliefs are changeable with time, effort and understanding of the world they live in.
> you're generally able to read as much as you want, talk to as many people as you want
No you can't. I'd love to read and research more on a wide range of topics but I don't have enough time. We all have to take shortcuts while developing our beliefs. Ultimately you have to choose a set of giant's shoulders to stand on, as they say. You can't thoroughly research everything on your own, and even if you could there's no guarantee that you'd come up with better answers than anybody else.
I certainly can't. I'm a victim of my own interpretation of the evidence. If I could choose what I believed, I'd choose a lot differently.
edit: I'm honestly jealous (and intolerant) of people who can. My deeply religious grandmother told me once during a long discussion about her Christianity that "faith" to her meant making a choice to believe. I told her that I have never had faith, and will never have faith. I have faith in that:)
> I really want to believe that I'll win the lottery, but I just can't bring myself to accepting it.
Probably for the best. Your belief that you will win the lottery doesn't mean that you actually will win the lottery, but it might lead to you losing a lot of money.
You don't choose to believe something different. You deliberate on your beliefs. And either find validation or repudiation or somewhere in between. Beliefs are formed over a lifetime and in constant (though perhaps slow motion) flux. Consider (for yourself) your present stance on a non-theological postition. Death penalty, abortion, universal suffrage, the draft, something. Consider what you presently believe and why. Then question it. Research or seek out the opposing view. Hold serious (non-strawman) debates in your own mind on the various potential stances and their rationales. Maybe you come back from this unchanged, changed to an opposing view, or to a middle ground. But you'll have arrived their deliberately.
That's the essence of being a rational human adult. If you can't, figure out why. If you won't, you're still a child.
With practice, one can objectify and analyze their beliefs. You can start to identify what lens is active that you're filtering reality through. I highly recommend such a practice as it will allow you to hold multiple conflicting beliefs simultaneously.
If you'd like a taste at some of the advanced stages that are available with belief objectification, I recommend this short PDF:
> If two beliefs are mutually conflicting then at least one is wrong.
Not necessarily. Since you try bringing math in, then there are other possibilities—both could be consistent with your axioms. The continuum hypothesis is neither "true" nor "false", but rather independent of the axioms of ZFC. You are free to adopt it, or its negation, and proceed from there.
It may be insane to the typical person, but if you start to objectify the lens that is active, then you can see there are multiple conflicting truths.
As an example:
Belief 1: The floor I am standing on is real.
Of course it is real. I can experience it right now.
Belief 2: The floor I am standing on is not real.
Of course it is not real. Most materials are empty space and our nervous system generates the experience of solidity. Besides, time doesn't exist as there is only this present experience so there is no container for material things to exist in.
I regard both of these as true from different lenses.
Is it insane? Maybe. But it also avoids a ton of existential angst.
> Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.
Would the author of this comment be willing to say the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot? Say, a high school refusing to hire someone based on their liberal beliefs (say, transgender people being able to use the bathroom they identify as)? After all, it's very possible for the school to say "nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them".
To the author of that comment your idea is nonsensical - if they are incontrovertibly correct, than any other viewpoint isn't and as such is not only wrong but malevolently so. This isn't about an exchange of ideas, it's identity politics. At most, this would necessitate the wielding of righteous indignation to 'correct' the mistaken impressions of misinformed person.
'Say, a high school refusing to hire someone based on their liberal beliefs (say, transgender people being able to use the bathroom they identify as)? After all, it's very possible for the school to say "nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them".'
Yes, the school could say that, but they might not be right (a case of a valid but unsound argument). In any case I view that hypothetical (barring a teacher based on what they think about transgender bathroom priveleges) as preferable to, say, barring a teacher based on something they had no say on such as their skin color (although, as I must continue to point out-- that doesn't mean it's not also preferable to not discriminate at all!)
"You can't choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs."
You sound really confident about that, would you care to cite your research? My ignorant assumption would be that people's temperaments would segregate them into political views naturally. I know Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of research into this area, and he has some interesting ideas - "All political movements base appeals on different settings of the foundations—and the culture wars arise from what they choose to emphasize. Liberals jack up care, followed by fairness and liberty. They rarely value loyalty and authority. Conservatives dial up all six."[http://www.thelavinagency.com/blog-jonathan-haidt-difference...]
> The racism that liberals show towards colored conservatives is Klan-grade. Justice Clarence Thomas' media portrayal is a testament.
If its only against conservatives, its not racism.
> Its very interesting why the all diversity loving liberals, live in heavily white neighborhoods.
That's true of wealthy liberals (just as it is for wealthy conservatives), because they live in heavily wealthy neighborhoods, and wealth and race are correlated in the US (liberals, wealthy or not, tend to see this correlation as a problem, though.) Non-wealthy liberals tend to live in more ethnically diverse neighborhoods because (and, I suspect, moreso than do non-wealthy conservatives.)
Its a term predominantly used by black critics of a black seen as a collaborator with white oppressors of blacks.
If it is racist at all, it is racist against whites, as it communicates distaste for a person based on their relationship to another hated group (but even then, its not communicating a problem with their relationship with whites as whites, but with white oppressors as oppressors, so whether its racist against whites is probably questionable.)
There's scenarios where its use could be a form of paternalistic anti-black racism, such as its use by whites of a particular persuasion to criticize a black defector from white-led political program in favor of an opposing white-led political movement.
You can't choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs.
...a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.
it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
Is this what we really want? A society of distrusting, hating separatist camps that vilify and exclude each other? Using organizational authority to actively punish "thoughtcrime" should be anathema to fellow liberals and those who espouse humanist values. However, there is (and always has been) a collectivist/identity/responsibility camp who thinks such authoritarian stances are ok.
A tolerant society needs to tolerate the free expression of dissenting and even reprehensible speech. A tolerant democratic society should tolerate legal political expression. As much as an enlightened company should have room for projects to experiment and "fail fast," a society should afford its citizens the opportunity to choose "the wrong" side. Really, the whole point of a democratic society, is that there's no one entity above imposing their idea of right and wrong over the populace.
Collectivism isn't evil and it is a deep part of what it means to be human, but it can't be allowed to trump the rights of the individual. People are best protected and served when collectivism and individualism are in balance.
Obviously I'm equivocating, since that would make no sense any other way. The smooth progression over the past 70-80 years where "liberalism" has turned a 180 that at times it seems like nobody has noticed is... I dunno... fascinating, if nothing else. Tolerance, diversity, free speech, many other words, all have rotated 180 degrees in that time frame.
In addition to the left-right spectrum, there's also an authoritarianism scale. The one dimensional left-right spectrum seems to be bent into a horseshoe, with the open end facing up. The up-down axis measures authoritarianism. So the further towards the ends of the spectrum you are, the more authoritarian your stance is.
Others map this on 2-axes, like the D&D alignment diagram.
The one dimensional left-right spectrum seems to be bent into a horseshoe [...] the further towards the ends of the spectrum you are, the more authoritarian your stance is.
Cool observation - I really like this. Though in effect it goes from being one dimensional to two dimensional: x being extent of services, production, distribution, and exchange controlled by state or private bodies, y being level of participation of the population in the decision making process.
You could add z to measure spending policy - now you can represent fiscal conservatism, level of democracy and social policy as a tetrahedron.
> Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.
Luckily people are very good at making judgement calls about who to include and who to exclude, right? "Culture fit" is a great way to end up with a diverse workforce, isn't it? And obviously "unconscious bias" isn't ever a thing.
You can choose political beliefs if you are aware of alternative political beliefs existing. If you live, work, and learn in an environment that is actively excluding political beliefs, so that only one political belief exists in your environment, can you really choose your political belief then?
It's debatable if nothing productive can come from sharing a department with people whose beliefs are different from your own, but it's actively counterproductive to exclude those people.
> If you are one of those things, you are much more likely to believe in creationism, or conspiracy theories, or so-called ‘scientific racism’, or any of a number of other destructive and thoroughly debunked ideas
I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means.
> I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means.
The blog post still makes the very important point that no one cares about beliefs when hiring. If one so chooses to be a bad teacher and teach things that are flat out wrong, well, that just makes firing them justified based on incompetence.
I think the NYTimes article is begging the question; if you ask why there are fewer conservatives/evangelicals/fundamentalists in the universities, one possible answer is that they are self-selecting, not that they're being discriminated against.
How do you know that? Very little evidence is offered. The other side is quoting studies about bias in hiring, and the reply is basically "we would never do that, trust us".
Edit: re self-selection, two points:
1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad.
2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
> 1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad.
Not necessarily; if someone realizes that their basic beliefs are incompatible with the basic tenets of an institution, that saves everyone time in the long run.
And I'd like to see some evidence, any evidence of professors being hostile to conservatives. And no, "God's not Dead" doesn't count. That's such a persecution complex strawman.
> 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
There's diversity and there is pandering to vox populi and anti-intellectualism. The first is good, the second is not, and quite frankly, the face of modern conservatism in America has been anti-intellectual for quite some time.
And hey, Kristoff seems to have misrepresented the data!
I don't see anything in that essay that supports any but a very broad interpretation of the phrase "misrepresented the data". I see a bunch of innuendo and odd stats like this one:
> Of professors who say that they are religious, fully 19% of them can be classified as “traditionalists,” which would include evangelical Christians (which in Kristof’s NYT op-ed were presented as a maligned minority, not part of the solid 1-in-5 religious professors who are traditionalists found by the survey).
One in five religious professors are traditionalists. So what?
I think the article is on point, but what makes it a little hard is simply the nomenclature "conservative" vs "progressive" or "liberal" is this just shorthand for republican or democrat, or about actual political belief systems
The author repeatedly conflates conservatism with Christianity. While there's probably a higher percentage of Christians who identify as conservative, it's not their conservatism that would trouble me in a University setting. I wouldn't want a University science professor to be a creationist for example, but I couldn't care less if they're fiscal conservative who believes in small government.
If we didn't discriminate against the type of conservative religious people who believe in using the power of institutions to advance their religious goals, women, homosexuals, and religious minorities would have a tougher time than they already do. Christianity in this article is a red herring, because I'm sure that conservative fundamentalist Muslims face the same discrimination, and so would conservative evangelical astrologers, if you could find any.
What religious people seem to be angry about is the lack of symmetry - that they are judged for discriminating against reasonable people. The lack of symmetry is due to the fact that the universities being discussed are intended to be institutions of reason. There are other universities for people who believe in every sort of invisible world, which do not hesitate to discriminate openly, and fight for their right to do so.
As a thought experiment, what happens if your liberal non-religious individuals start advancing goals that result in discrimination, because they do not value intellectual diversity?
I think there's more to it than "academics are hostile to conservatives".
The conservative movement in this country is vehemently anti-intellectual. People love to point to Trump but even George W Bush played dumb to appeal to his base.
Add in a strongly capitalistic attitude among the american right, that smart ambitious people should work in industry and not in "ivory towers". Why would a fan of Ayn Rand take a government job for meager pay?
Academics are probably biased against conservatives. But a conservative is biased against becoming an academic as well.
“I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,”
Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it.
You are being passed for jobs in academia partly because academia deals in truths and evangelical Christians usually have a world view lacking in many truths. Personally, yeah I would pass you for an academic job if I found out you were an evangelical christian. How can I trust you to know truths in your profession when you believe in complete nonsense like the earth began 2,000 years ago and that evolution doesn't exist. How can I trust you NOT to evangelize in the classroom? Isn't that the whole point of being an evangelical Christian?
Get over it. Religious extremism in ALL FORMS is a cancer and needs to be eliminated from society. Join the rest of the modern world or be further relegated to the edge as you so rightfully deserve to be.
>I could choose to indulge my fabulous side and cross dress
Well, personally, I would say you are born with a fabulous side so you are just being true to yourself. Congrats and have fun!
> Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
The problem is you are making a choice not only to believe in something completely void of fact (you can be ignorant if you want to be I guess) but you are also making a choice that HARMS society as a whole. When a person's choice guides them to discriminate a whole group of people based on some stories written a few thousands of years ago thats a choice that deserves to be critiqued. If your choice guides the people you vote for to be anti-science yeah, that choice deserves to be ridiculed.
Honestly, I don't think it does; traditional protected classes, after all, include things that are just as much choice as political ideology (particularly, religion.)
"Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it."
It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not. AFAIK, this hasn't yet been shown for being gay! Conservatives don't have a choice.
Now that you know that conservatives are in fact born that way, at least more so than gays, can you spare some compassion for conservatives? You can make them feel really weird with affirmative action quotas for conservatives.
> It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not. AFAIK, this hasn't yet been shown for being gay! Conservatives don't have a choice.
Um what? There have been PLENTY of studies over the last few years indicating homosexuality is expressed either at a DNA level or as the brain is developing in utero.
>It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not.
First, show me where this has been studied. Peer reviewed please. Second, if your conservatism violates human rights, yeah thats a problem. Conservatism, in the US has been the excuse for slavery (the bible says we are better than them!), Jim Crow and segregation, interracial marriage, and now LGBT rights. Conservatives have been on the WRONG side of history on ALL of these issues.
The decline of conservatives in academia in the humanities and social sciences (other than economics) post-dates the conservative movement's dismissal of the value of those fields and is a natural consequence of it: if you are part of a political movement which rejects the value of a field of work, you are less likely to seek to work in that field (and, conversely, if you value work in a particular field, you are more likely to split from a political movement that does not.)
If conservatives started painting those fields as valuable fields for scholarship which needed more conservative scholars, the gap would, I suspect, substantially disappear within a generation.
(The actual problem is nicely highlighted in this article's most popular Reader Picks comments)
There is a popular narrative about what it means to be conservative, liberal, progressive, etc. This narrative is a small simple band in a vastly complex spectrum of views. Unfortunately, we have come to the point where the narrative is being echoed so much that it's impossible to have a conversation framed outside the popular narrative.
We have all been trained and self-trained to pigeonhole each other based on these meaningless labels to either a) dismiss each other or b) rally together to dismiss the "other".
The one thing that we can't do is suspend our emotional biases and sincerely listen to alternate narratives.
Before you dismiss this as truth-challenged partisans who want recognition of their unjustifiable views, read this. There is a pretty compelling case to be made that a lot of important questions facing us today are being studied by a relatively politically homogenous group of people, and beliefs not rigorously supported by evidence nonetheless become orthodoxy. A monoculture of thought on questions that are far from settled: http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/
No. I would not hire anyone in a science department who professed a belief of a 6000 year old earth or that didn't "believe in" evolution. I wouldn't vote for anyone who thought that the U.S. should be run based on the bible.
No I'm not an atheist but I am against anti-intellectualism.
And yet, Colleges have no problem hiring individuals that believe some pretty scientifically unfounded things, as long as what they believe falls in line with the orthodoxy.
98 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] threadI think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. Even if you put aside how odious and xenophobic what Trump has proposed, it's basically impossible to implement any of it anyways and anyone with an ounce of critical reasoning skills would easily realize that. And the one area where colleges cannot compromise on the faculty is in the area of critical reasoning skills. More than anything else, the purpose of a college education is to learn critical reasoning skills.
GP didn't say (or imply) that Trump is an evangelical; there was an implication in that post that lack of critical reasoning, which is a trait GP also ascribes to evangelicals, among the Republican electorate was a factor in Trump's success, though.
While Donald Trump has blown up the entire conservative base this year, this is fundamentally untrue.
Read through the Growth and Opportunity project, written by key conservatives in 2012. http://goproject.gop.com/
There is a LOT of depth and understanding here that liberals miss out all the time. True, conservatives have blind spots in their policies. But liberals have blind spots all the same.
And when you read good reports like the Growth and Opportunity Project, you start seeing the benefits of conservative thought. Conservatives are very local and have trust in the smallest, closest government to them. (So much so, they wish to remove powers from the Federal government to "give back to the States"). In part, its because local government is where the GOP and conservative values functions best.
In particular, I found the chapter on Campaign Finance to be intriguing, because online you normally only see people who are against Citizens United. But you can see that the true conservative argument is far more nuanced and comes from a completely different perspective.
The wall is the best example. He wants to build a massive wall that will cost tens of billions of dollars. That wall ignores the fact that almost all illegal immigration comes from visa overstays rather than people walking across the border. And the wall would still be relatively easy to get over without someone guarding it.
Last Week Tonight, a comedy show, did a pretty thorough dismantling [1] of the logic behind building it. Scientists, Engineers and Immigration officials would have an even easier time arguing against it. It's just a really stupid idea that he probably came up with watching Game of Thrones (Mexicans == Wildlings) and yet he's used it to help win the Republican nomination.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuaDG7_FBZ8
Is it related to their religion, their conservatism, or something else?
Many people who belong to the academic community consider these people to be a bunch of uneducated backwater hicks who do not belong in intellectual conversations based on logical thought. So when an intellectual states that they are an evangelical christian, many consider them to be flawed in some capacity, and thus have nothing of substance to contribute.
EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible; in that the world was created in literally seven days, and that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, a story which in its literal translation is of course not supported by science. So when a person who professes to follow science also professes to be a member of this faith, it can seem paradoxical to many.
Like, imagine some perfectly decent person who has lived all his life in some small town in Nebraska, who isn't very educated but also isn't a terrible person who goes around looking for excuses to hate people. Rural voters are statistically more religious and more conservative, so he probably has extra peer pressure to be like that himself, but at the same time is a little creeped out by people like Cruz who seem to be trying to convince him that atheist non-white city dwellers think that him and his family and friends are subhuman, and are trying to take away his rights and his livelihood. So he's on the fence, until one day he stumbles across someone complaining about "uneducated backwater hicks", at which point he decides that Cruz might be right after all, because clearly these college-educated urban strangers really do hate him and his friends and relatives.
It's a vicious circle that's only broken when people just suck it up and take the high road, but it feels like there's just never quite enough people willing to do that to make a difference. It's easy to judge less educated or less successful people, and I'm sure it feels really cathartic to do so. Especially when many of those people are being used as pawns by demagogues who are actively trying to roll back civilization. It's much harder to turn the other cheek and try to find common ground with them. Sadly that's the only way the trend towards cultural polarization is ever going to reverse, because neither side is going anyplace.
Actually, plenty of Evangelicals I've seen have cited strict literalism as one of the problems in Fundamentalism that Evangelicalism reacted against; while Evangelicals are more likely to view any particular part of the Bible as intended literally than are Christians who are neither Evangelical or Fundamentalist, there are plenty of Evangelicals who don't hold that the Bible is, cover to cover, intended literally.
If the orientation or race of these people is irrelevant to them performing their duties, why is faith or political leaning relevant?
It is almost never irrelevant. You know what George Bush said about Putin when he met him? He said he could tell that he was a great guy because he was wearing his grandmother's cross. If the leader of the free world can be tricked so easily because of his faith it is an issue. Especially when we know Putin hasn't worn the cross before or after. He figured that is all it took to fool the leader of the free world.
No, they aren't. The Evangelical movement was a reaction against elements of the Fundamentalist movement in much the same way that the Fundamentalist movement was a reaction against liberal/modernist Christianity, and explicitly saw itself as between the two. (It covers, in practice, a wide range, and obviously the more exclusionary, more nearly Fundamentalist edge of the Evangelical community has the most visibility in media, which tends to be conflict-oriented, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that the tarnishing and genericization of the "fundamentalist" label has probably led to actual Fundamentalists grabbing on to the Evangelical label without the substance.)
Which is still not true as a generalization by any meaningful definition of "fundamentalist". The Evangelical movement was precisely a reaction against the elements of the Fundamentalist movement that made "fundamentalist" a generic term of zealous, narrow-minded extremists.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
Long story short, Christians are "red tribe", and most other religions can be thought of as "blue tribe".
"Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself. (for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)"
links to studies on the matter too
Also the article lists: "But that doesn’t explain why there are conservative math professors but not many right-wing anthropologists." I imagine that say, in the extreme cases of say: evangelical young earth creationists or a evangelical mormon believing that humans are 5000 years old or that Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel is counterproductive.
"My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination."
miss the mark. Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them. The feelings of the author (and me, and a lot of others besides) is that staunch liberals in academia might be flawed in excluding conservatives. But not because it's akin to racism, it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
“Why stop there [hiring conservatives]?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”
edit: Which, IMO, is a weak argument specifically designed to avoid mentioning reparations, which can make some of the nicest white people go feral.
the saddest part is how it equates war victims and trafficked children to conservative scholars.
Can one? My political beliefs aren't my tastes: they are things that I believe. I can't choose what I believe to be true. Can you?
Yes.
This means your beliefs ought to be malleable. And when they don't change after evaluation you ought to have a reason for it. Even if it's just: No new evidence, evaluate later.
Uhhh, what? Fundamentally belief is the acceptance in an idea as true or real. It represents the amount of confidence you have in what is presented to you. Confidence can be based on many things (evidence, social pressure, etc) and can change over time. So you are absolutely free to choose what you believe is true or false.
Now, when it comes to the actual topic at hand – political liberalism vs. political conservatism – I don't think the vast majority of people's political beliefs are the result of a conscious choice to believe one thing rather than another – they are primarily the consequences of social and emotional and personality factors (reason and evidence do play a role, but far less than either side would like to think.) While in theory a person could consciously choose to try to make themselves believe in a particular political ideology, I doubt many people ever actually make that choice in practice.
No, The second doesn't follow from the first. Sure, confidence can change over time. That doesn't mean that you can make a conscious choice to believe something. (With skill, you may be able to identify the factors that influence your belief and then chose behaviors which will lead to experiencing the factors that will influence your belief in the direction you wish, but its absolutely not directly and simply within your control, even before considering that a belief that something is true itself generally precludes the belief that you should believe that it is not true in the first place.)
In practice, you're generally able to read as much as you want, talk to as many people as you want, and choose who you care about and what issues are important to you. A person's beliefs are changeable with time, effort and understanding of the world they live in.
No you can't. I'd love to read and research more on a wide range of topics but I don't have enough time. We all have to take shortcuts while developing our beliefs. Ultimately you have to choose a set of giant's shoulders to stand on, as they say. You can't thoroughly research everything on your own, and even if you could there's no guarantee that you'd come up with better answers than anybody else.
edit: I'm honestly jealous (and intolerant) of people who can. My deeply religious grandmother told me once during a long discussion about her Christianity that "faith" to her meant making a choice to believe. I told her that I have never had faith, and will never have faith. I have faith in that:)
Probably for the best. Your belief that you will win the lottery doesn't mean that you actually will win the lottery, but it might lead to you losing a lot of money.
That's the essence of being a rational human adult. If you can't, figure out why. If you won't, you're still a child.
If you'd like a taste at some of the advanced stages that are available with belief objectification, I recommend this short PDF:
http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in...
If two beliefs are mutually conflicting then at least one is wrong. If X^Y is false, then I don't want to believe that X^Y is true. That'd be insane!
Not necessarily. Since you try bringing math in, then there are other possibilities—both could be consistent with your axioms. The continuum hypothesis is neither "true" nor "false", but rather independent of the axioms of ZFC. You are free to adopt it, or its negation, and proceed from there.
As an example:
Belief 1: The floor I am standing on is real.
Of course it is real. I can experience it right now.
Belief 2: The floor I am standing on is not real.
Of course it is not real. Most materials are empty space and our nervous system generates the experience of solidity. Besides, time doesn't exist as there is only this present experience so there is no container for material things to exist in.
I regard both of these as true from different lenses.
Is it insane? Maybe. But it also avoids a ton of existential angst.
I'm not sure why you're downplaying this; in an academic setting, that seems just as objectionable as racism.
Would the author of this comment be willing to say the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot? Say, a high school refusing to hire someone based on their liberal beliefs (say, transgender people being able to use the bathroom they identify as)? After all, it's very possible for the school to say "nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them".
Yes, the school could say that, but they might not be right (a case of a valid but unsound argument). In any case I view that hypothetical (barring a teacher based on what they think about transgender bathroom priveleges) as preferable to, say, barring a teacher based on something they had no say on such as their skin color (although, as I must continue to point out-- that doesn't mean it's not also preferable to not discriminate at all!)
You sound really confident about that, would you care to cite your research? My ignorant assumption would be that people's temperaments would segregate them into political views naturally. I know Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of research into this area, and he has some interesting ideas - "All political movements base appeals on different settings of the foundations—and the culture wars arise from what they choose to emphasize. Liberals jack up care, followed by fairness and liberty. They rarely value loyalty and authority. Conservatives dial up all six."[http://www.thelavinagency.com/blog-jonathan-haidt-difference...]
Its very interesting why the all diversity loving liberals, live in heavily white neighborhoods. Actions, speak louder than words.
If its only against conservatives, its not racism.
> Its very interesting why the all diversity loving liberals, live in heavily white neighborhoods.
That's true of wealthy liberals (just as it is for wealthy conservatives), because they live in heavily wealthy neighborhoods, and wealth and race are correlated in the US (liberals, wealthy or not, tend to see this correlation as a problem, though.) Non-wealthy liberals tend to live in more ethnically diverse neighborhoods because (and, I suspect, moreso than do non-wealthy conservatives.)
If it is racist at all, it is racist against whites, as it communicates distaste for a person based on their relationship to another hated group (but even then, its not communicating a problem with their relationship with whites as whites, but with white oppressors as oppressors, so whether its racist against whites is probably questionable.)
There's scenarios where its use could be a form of paternalistic anti-black racism, such as its use by whites of a particular persuasion to criticize a black defector from white-led political program in favor of an opposing white-led political movement.
...a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.
it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
Is this what we really want? A society of distrusting, hating separatist camps that vilify and exclude each other? Using organizational authority to actively punish "thoughtcrime" should be anathema to fellow liberals and those who espouse humanist values. However, there is (and always has been) a collectivist/identity/responsibility camp who thinks such authoritarian stances are ok.
A tolerant society needs to tolerate the free expression of dissenting and even reprehensible speech. A tolerant democratic society should tolerate legal political expression. As much as an enlightened company should have room for projects to experiment and "fail fast," a society should afford its citizens the opportunity to choose "the wrong" side. Really, the whole point of a democratic society, is that there's no one entity above imposing their idea of right and wrong over the populace.
Collectivism isn't evil and it is a deep part of what it means to be human, but it can't be allowed to trump the rights of the individual. People are best protected and served when collectivism and individualism are in balance.
Obviously I'm equivocating, since that would make no sense any other way. The smooth progression over the past 70-80 years where "liberalism" has turned a 180 that at times it seems like nobody has noticed is... I dunno... fascinating, if nothing else. Tolerance, diversity, free speech, many other words, all have rotated 180 degrees in that time frame.
Others map this on 2-axes, like the D&D alignment diagram.
Cool observation - I really like this. Though in effect it goes from being one dimensional to two dimensional: x being extent of services, production, distribution, and exchange controlled by state or private bodies, y being level of participation of the population in the decision making process.
You could add z to measure spending policy - now you can represent fiscal conservatism, level of democracy and social policy as a tetrahedron.
That's not what I want, but it's certainly the the message I hear from conservatives and the republican party in this country.
Racism. Sexism. Class warfarism.
Collectivism isn't evil? It's an objectively false idea and actively destructive to human life. How is that not evil?
Luckily people are very good at making judgement calls about who to include and who to exclude, right? "Culture fit" is a great way to end up with a diverse workforce, isn't it? And obviously "unconscious bias" isn't ever a thing.
It's debatable if nothing productive can come from sharing a department with people whose beliefs are different from your own, but it's actively counterproductive to exclude those people.
I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means.
The blog post still makes the very important point that no one cares about beliefs when hiring. If one so chooses to be a bad teacher and teach things that are flat out wrong, well, that just makes firing them justified based on incompetence.
I think the NYTimes article is begging the question; if you ask why there are fewer conservatives/evangelicals/fundamentalists in the universities, one possible answer is that they are self-selecting, not that they're being discriminated against.
Edit: re self-selection, two points:
1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad.
2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
Not necessarily; if someone realizes that their basic beliefs are incompatible with the basic tenets of an institution, that saves everyone time in the long run.
And I'd like to see some evidence, any evidence of professors being hostile to conservatives. And no, "God's not Dead" doesn't count. That's such a persecution complex strawman.
> 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
There's diversity and there is pandering to vox populi and anti-intellectualism. The first is good, the second is not, and quite frankly, the face of modern conservatism in America has been anti-intellectual for quite some time.
And hey, Kristoff seems to have misrepresented the data!
https://medium.com/@ginasue/the-lie-of-liberal-intolerance-o...
Surprised, I am not.
> Of professors who say that they are religious, fully 19% of them can be classified as “traditionalists,” which would include evangelical Christians (which in Kristof’s NYT op-ed were presented as a maligned minority, not part of the solid 1-in-5 religious professors who are traditionalists found by the survey).
One in five religious professors are traditionalists. So what?
What religious people seem to be angry about is the lack of symmetry - that they are judged for discriminating against reasonable people. The lack of symmetry is due to the fact that the universities being discussed are intended to be institutions of reason. There are other universities for people who believe in every sort of invisible world, which do not hesitate to discriminate openly, and fight for their right to do so.
The conservative movement in this country is vehemently anti-intellectual. People love to point to Trump but even George W Bush played dumb to appeal to his base.
Add in a strongly capitalistic attitude among the american right, that smart ambitious people should work in industry and not in "ivory towers". Why would a fan of Ayn Rand take a government job for meager pay?
Academics are probably biased against conservatives. But a conservative is biased against becoming an academic as well.
Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it.
You are being passed for jobs in academia partly because academia deals in truths and evangelical Christians usually have a world view lacking in many truths. Personally, yeah I would pass you for an academic job if I found out you were an evangelical christian. How can I trust you to know truths in your profession when you believe in complete nonsense like the earth began 2,000 years ago and that evolution doesn't exist. How can I trust you NOT to evangelize in the classroom? Isn't that the whole point of being an evangelical Christian?
Get over it. Religious extremism in ALL FORMS is a cancer and needs to be eliminated from society. Join the rest of the modern world or be further relegated to the edge as you so rightfully deserve to be.
Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
Well, personally, I would say you are born with a fabulous side so you are just being true to yourself. Congrats and have fun!
> Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
The problem is you are making a choice not only to believe in something completely void of fact (you can be ignorant if you want to be I guess) but you are also making a choice that HARMS society as a whole. When a person's choice guides them to discriminate a whole group of people based on some stories written a few thousands of years ago thats a choice that deserves to be critiqued. If your choice guides the people you vote for to be anti-science yeah, that choice deserves to be ridiculed.
Honestly, I don't think it does; traditional protected classes, after all, include things that are just as much choice as political ideology (particularly, religion.)
"Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it."
It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not. AFAIK, this hasn't yet been shown for being gay! Conservatives don't have a choice.
Now that you know that conservatives are in fact born that way, at least more so than gays, can you spare some compassion for conservatives? You can make them feel really weird with affirmative action quotas for conservatives.
Um what? There have been PLENTY of studies over the last few years indicating homosexuality is expressed either at a DNA level or as the brain is developing in utero.
http://www.livescience.com/50058-being-gay-not-a-choice.html
>It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not.
First, show me where this has been studied. Peer reviewed please. Second, if your conservatism violates human rights, yeah thats a problem. Conservatism, in the US has been the excuse for slavery (the bible says we are better than them!), Jim Crow and segregation, interracial marriage, and now LGBT rights. Conservatives have been on the WRONG side of history on ALL of these issues.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/nature-versus-nurture-variants-d...
If conservatives started painting those fields as valuable fields for scholarship which needed more conservative scholars, the gap would, I suspect, substantially disappear within a generation.
There is a popular narrative about what it means to be conservative, liberal, progressive, etc. This narrative is a small simple band in a vastly complex spectrum of views. Unfortunately, we have come to the point where the narrative is being echoed so much that it's impossible to have a conversation framed outside the popular narrative.
We have all been trained and self-trained to pigeonhole each other based on these meaningless labels to either a) dismiss each other or b) rally together to dismiss the "other".
The one thing that we can't do is suspend our emotional biases and sincerely listen to alternate narratives.
No I'm not an atheist but I am against anti-intellectualism.
According to this, I'm center-left and anti-authoritarian:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/