Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite columnists, writes about the problem of student intimidation of professors in higher education in Academic Intimidation.  Reading the entire piece, you will see how the problem of intimidation is link right back to the . . . do you want to guess?  

Correct!   The Sixties! 

I bet you didn’t even have to strain a single brain cell for that one! 

Mr. Sowell writes:

“How did we get from there to where professors are being advised to not even have their phone numbers listed?

The answer to that question has implications not only for the academic world but for the society at large and for international relations.

It happened because people who ran colleges and universities were too squeamish to use the power they had, and relied instead on clever evasions to avoid confrontations. They were, as the British say, too clever by half.

"Negotiations" and "flexibility" were considered to be the more sophisticated alternative to confrontation.”

Of course, as we all know, "Negotiations" and "flexibility" leads to a third way, and currently, “[a]uthority in general, and physical force in particular, are anathema to many among the intelligentsia, academic or otherwise. They can always think of some "third way" to avoid hard choices, whether on campus, in society, or among nations.”  And the third way can be distilled to impotence and enabling.

During the 60s this ‘third way’ allowed the radicals to run ‘roughshod’ over the academic authority and the repercussions and concussions are still being felt. 

Getting to the title of my post, “Now, WWEHD?” or rather “What Would Eric Hoffer Do?”

Eric Hoffer, the blue collar philosopher and longshoreman, author of The True Believer (which outlines perfectly how and why the insanity of the Global Warming/Climate Change faith came into being) taught a seminar at Berkley during the 60s.   

In an interview in the book Hoffer’s American by James D. Koerner,. Hoffer approached the radical 60s environment differently: 

“Right at the beginning,” he says, “when these animals were running around threatening the faculty and call them awful names, calling them mother****ers, I let it be known that any punk who came to my class and called me a mother****er I was going to personally throw down those eight flights of steps, and then I was going to jump after him to be sure he found the bottom.”(74)

Was Hoffer advocating violence?  No.  A threat of violence, yes, because as he concluded:  “[E]verybody was very polite.”(74)

First it must be understood that good, reasonable and informed people don’t go around intimidating anyone through organized or random violence.  Nor do good, reasonable and informed people tolerate such behavior.  People that do are the problem.  “In Hoffer’s view, all excuses for the toleration of violence and crime are simply other names for cowardice--masks for fear.” (74)

Fear causes people to take the third way and that is “Playing nice-nice” with bad people.  Who are the bad people?  Well, I look at it this way.  I know pornography when I see it.  Why should recognizing bad people be any different? 

So, think about it:  WWEHD?

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Military atheism isn’t interested in freedom of religion, but in a cutesy, way wants freedom from religion for all of us--whether we want that or not   Because they want--no demand--that I have my freedom of  religion rescinded.  If I don’t do so voluntarily, militant atheists will take my freedom by any means they can pervert to their cause.

The Ten Commandments are being removed from public display, as are Christian religions displays, and under what guise?  Separation of Church and State.  A phrase which does not exist in any form in the Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights or Declaration of Independence.

For some time I thought about the phrase Separation of Church and State, and I’ve concluded that, when Thomas Jefferson considered it and wrote it in a letter to a friend, his only concern was to save religion from government and not the other way around.  Government perverts religion. 

King Henry II had Thomas Becket murdered, not the other way around.  King Henry VIII couldn’t have it his way so we have the Church of England, and Communist China created its own church, its own opiate of the people.

Militant atheism is vulgar, cruel and a liar, hiding from its own bloody history, a history so recent that the blood is still wet.  Gulags, secret police, and genocide (look to Stalin’s systematic starvation of Ukrainians) and Militant Atheism’s nihilism reeks of infamy and duplicity. 

Atheism is an amoral, supremacist belief, whose members tout knowledge as the only truth, because science ‘says so,’ while conveniently forgetting that the scientists who enthusiastically created the bomb, and then brooded about their efforts only after the bombs were dropped.

Knowledge can’t supplant wisdom, because wisdom comes from time and experience not science.

To quote T. S. Elliot:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

One of the great ironies of the Atheism is the concept of Freethought.  Atheists insist on no God, and rest their creation of life on the Alter of Evolution.  In regard to Evolution the human being or any other species for that matter behaves according to a ‘hardwired’ or genetically coded behavior.  That’s it folks.  Evolution equals no Freethought.  And no Freedom of Will for that matter.  

So, militant atheists, and atheists in general, have to face the fact that you are a genetically coded phenomenon with no freedom.  You also have to face the fact that since you are in the minority, your atheistic genetic coding is recessive.  A fluke like color blindness or webbed toes.

So, in a way, a militant atheist is kind of like that odd relative everyone talks about and doesn’t want in a position to make anything decisions.  Or have a gun like the guy in Colorado who professed to "hate all Christians."  Not saying he was an atheist, but I can’t say he wasn’t.

To the atheist I say, "Merry Christmas," because I value it, and that's enough.

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Here Dennis Prager offers an apology for the multitude of Baby Boomer transgressions, which is thoughtful. 

Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology

By Dennis Prager

FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 04, 2007

We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins . . . more.

But sometime ago, I considered this:

At the most perilous moment in American history, the Greatest Generation choked.  They allowed their children to run roughshod over the 1960’s college campus instead of kicking their self-indigent children in the pants and saying, “Get back to class or get a job!”  (I’ve written this before.)

The irony of the 60s is that most of what needed to be done was accomplished by 1964.  The first Civil Rights legislation was passed.  The Pill was available by 1960.  Elvis had already been moving his pelvis for a decade, so what was left?  Vietnam and all those ‘anti-war’ demonstrations.  Will the fact of the matter is, those ‘anti-war’ demonstrations effectively end as soon as Nixon, a Republican, ended the draft, then interestingly enough those ‘anti-war’ demonstrations dried up and blew away.  

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Dinesh D'Souza has another one of his interesting columns about his on-going debates with atheists.

God v. Atheism: My Debate with Daniel Dennett
By Dinesh D'Souza

“On Friday, November 30, I debated philosopher Daniel Dennett at Tufts University on the topic, "Is God a Man-Made Invention?" This was my third debate against a leading atheist, following my debate with Michael Shermer at Oregon State University . . . more.”

As always, read the whole column. 

But now I’ll comment on one bit that I enjoyed and D'Souza writes:

“Most memorable for me was the philosophically-minded savant who pooh-poohed the possibility of God's existence on the basis of what he called the Principle of Parsimony. He argued that either propositions are true by definition, or they are true by empirical verification. If a proposition cannot satisfy either criteria, then it is meaningless. Since God does not exist by definition, the young man insisted, and since we cannot verify His presence empirically, clearly God has been refuted by the Principle of Parsimony.

I asked our undergraduate savant to apply his twofold test to the Principle of Parsimony itself. Is it true by definition? No. Well, can it be verified empirically? Again, no. Therefore by the student's own criteria the Principle of Parismony is worthless and can be cast aside. The student had no comeback to this and neither did Dennett.”

For me I found it interesting that a “philosophically-minded savant who pooh-poohed the possibility of God's existence on the basis of what he called the Principle of Parsimony,” a methodological procedure espoused by William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar.  You know, a Catholic.

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