I posted this comment to the University of Iowa's newspaper, The Daily Iowan, on July 13, 2006, and I think it bears repeating here:

Religion's place in higher education
Abstract:Argument merits attention Sommerville argues there is a "general academic culture" of secularism in the United States, which he defines as the categorical exclusion of religious or spiritual perspectives from serious consideration in a university setting....

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Libris Fidelis
posted 7/13/06 @ 11:44 AM EST

Just like the common usage of saying the letter "oh" in a number instead of the number "zero", the use of the term "religion" in the Opinion article Religion's Place In Higher Education is improper.

The definition of "religion" comes from the ancient Greek, which means simply "way of life", not exclusively in god-believing. Additionally, the combination of the words "education" and "(god-believing) religion" is an oxymoron. Education has to do with the provision and acquisition of facts to be learned, whereas god-believing has its own keyword "believing", to warn the observing participant: belief and knowledge are not the same.

Belief is the acceptance of something without proof or veracity of reality. Sometimes believing is justified, provided the believer reserves an open mind for accepting new information and accepts that the belief is probably wrong. Knowledge, on the other hand, is something that can be proven by anyone else who wishes to investigate. The belief that the moon is made of blue cheese is now disprovable, but even with seemingly invisible micro-organisms, with the right equipment and skill, anyone can witness micro-organisms.

Believing and knowing are not compatible in education and science. A belief in something will always be tested by true scientists, historians, and philosophers, who, in this specific, all have the honesty to admit when they do not know something. False scientists, historians and philosophers assert things, rather than test more fully their own perceptions and reasoning. This is how Dr. Williams, of Johns Hopkins University, discredited Freud as the unscientific fraud salesman that he was: Dr. Williams demonstrated that Freud was totally unscientific in his manner and related the address by Freud to the University of Vienna in 1899, in which Freud scornfully asserted that it was the "duty" of mental science researchers to accept Freud's theories and not to question them, and to assail anyone who differed with Freud's dictations.
-- Libris Fidelis LibrisFidelis@hotmail.com