[...]
It would take me too far afield to justify the point, but this sort of charge has become possible only by an astonishing revolution in the meaning of tolerance. It used to be that tolerance was the virtue of the person who held strong views about something or other, but who insisted that those who disagreed had an equal right to defend their views – the sort of stance picked up in the slogan, "I may detest your opinions, but I shall defend to the death your right to speak them." Today, however, tolerance is the virtue of the person who holds no strong views, except for the strongly held view that it is wrong to hold strong views, or to indicate that someone else might be wrong.
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Vale a pena ler o artigo completo: Maintaining Scientific and Christian Truths in a Postmodern World
Publicado por ecos em março 3, 2006 11:08 PMExtraordinário texto. Apesar de não ser esse o tema central do artigo, gostei esp. de uma nota de rodapé inicial:
"I suspect that this shared belief in the existence of culture-transcending
truth has something to do with the fact that on many university campuses of the Western world there is now a much higher percentage of Christians among lecturers and students who are connected with the ‘hard’
sciences, or sometimes with mathematics and business, than among lecturers and students who are connected with
the arts and the social sciences. More commonly, I think, scientists are inclined to hold that their own disciplines,
and perhaps some other hard sciences, deal with truth, but that anything outside such domains has a much looser
connection to truth. In short, many scientists are modernist with regard to their own disciplines, and postmodernist
elsewhere, not least in the domain of religion."
No que às Humanidades diz respeito, tenho cada vez mais a convicção de que o seu declínio actual - e irreversível, IMHO - se deve aos excessos do pós-modernismo e do ateísmo radical na Academia. Como se costuma dizer, não se pode deitar fora o bébé com a água do banho, sob pena de se ficar perante o vazio...
Afixado por: DK em março 4, 2006 09:53 AM