Yes, an inability to live and let live, and an insistence on imposing one’s religious beliefs and practices on other people, is indeed immoral.
Conflicting morals are bound to create conflict eventually. It’s inevitable. It’s wrong to stand by and allow evil to be done, but ‘evil’ depends on your morals, so to prevent it you must impose your beliefs on other people. This is true for secular values as for religious ones.
Conservatives who say that are playing “The Victim Card.” They are claiming to be an “oppressed minority.” Ridiculous!
Can anybody believe that professors and administrators at Conservative schools, such as Liberty University or Bob Jones University, are tolerant of dissenting liberal opinions?
I attended two conservative Christian colleges (although neither Liberty nor BJU) and, yes, in general, dissenting opinions were tolerated. At one of them, the administration seemed to be very tolerant of LGBT in particular. They would also publish some op-eds in the student newspaper that were very liberal (although by and large the majority of the student body still skewed conservative).
The tales of conservative intolerance seem to be more common at the K-12 level than at college. I’ve read of one student being given an F in middle school or high school merely for writing an essay arguing that rock music was not necessarily bad (by a Christian teacher who apparently did believe it was always bad - and not because the essay had any grammatical flaws or anything of that sort).
In my college experience, in a conservative college, there was always at least one conservative student who took exception to the course material.
Like if the course touched on evolutionary biology or developmental biology, the first week would be the professor resignedly saying “okay, here are all the anti-evolution arguments that freshmen raise in the first week, you aren’t the first, this is how they’re flawed, here’s further reading, we won’t be going into it again.”
Yet it wasn’t uncommon that the churchies and homeschoolers still wanted to get into it anyhow, and had to be redirected to office hours, and acted all butthurt that they weren’t being allowed to act out their persecution fantasy in class. So incredibly annoying.
That sounds very tedious. At least the professors were allowed to tell the students they were wrong and not required to believe in creationism or whatever themselves.
It appears you’ve slippery-sloped yourself directly from “we agree to disagree” to “If we disagree, you must be eliminated/assimilated”.
One position sounds pretty liberal. The other sounds rather reactionary. Color me unimpressed by your “logic”.
By ‘impose your beliefs on other people’ I was thinking more along the lines of forcing them to bake cakes for gay weddings, rather than eliminating anyone. Is assimilation the ultimate aim? You tell me.
I’ve taught at the college level for twenty years, and I don’t think there have been any (relevant) changes in colleges. If anything, I suspect colleges are more cautious than they used to be about challenging students’ beliefs, now that recording devices are ubiquitous and it’s easy for (often out-of-context) clips of exchanges between professors and students to go viral.
I do suspect that there may have been a change in the way that Americans think about political identity in general; somewhere along the way, “conservative” went from being something that one believes (and that your kids, therefore, could stop believing at any time) to something that one is (on par with other core aspects of identity, and therefore, the kind of thing where it’s plausible to fear discrimination). I don’t know exactly when or why this happened, but it does feel like there’s been a shift.
Interesting point. I’m guessing it’s linked to the increase in tribalism in general. Stereotypically, there are cultural differences between the ‘red tribe’ and the ‘blue tribe’ in America, not just differences in beliefs. This probably contributes to seeing them as identities rather than just voting preferences.
Of course we brainwashed them. The geography professor insisted the world was not flat. The biology professor told them that evolution was real. I maintained that pi was not 3 (as it says, or at least implies, in the Bible). And nearly all of us encouraged critical thinking, which leads many to change their views. And many students become more liberal as a result.
With FACTS and LOGIC!
Um, nobody’s forcing anybody to “bake cakes for gay weddings”.
However, if you have voluntarily chosen to go into the bakery business and offer wedding cakes as part of your product line available to the public at large, then IMHO you are not entitled to refuse to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple because you personally disapprove of same-sex marriage, any more than you’re entitled to refuse to sell a wedding cake to an interracial couple because you personally disapprove of “miscegenation”.
It’s not a matter of “imposing beliefs on other people”: you as a baker are still allowed to have a personal belief that same-sex marriage is wrong. It’s a matter of your not being allowed to discriminate against certain customers in your legally regulated business because of your personal beliefs.
You can discriminate on the basis of personal prejudice when it comes to who you choose for your friends, or who you choose for your spouse, or who you choose for your favorite Hollywood celebrity, or anything else that strictly involves your personal life.
But you can’t discriminate on the basis of personal prejudice in who you choose for your customers in your business which is officially a place of public accommodation. Businesses in the US exist under the jurisdiction of federal and state commerce laws, so the government has a vested interest in, and to some extent is allowed to regulate, how you run your business. If you don’t like the fact that you as a professional baker can’t refuse to sell your publicly advertised products to certain members of the public because you personally disapprove of them, tough: nobody’s forcing you to be a professional baker.
(That said, it’s true that at least up till recently the federal courts have not held sexual orientation to be a protected category from discrimination, but from what I’ve read the recent Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court decision could substantially change that.)
That’s reassuring. Thanks.
My university biology instructor gave us a speech about the difference between a testable theory and a belief. He said something to the effect of, “Maybe an ultimate being created everything from scratch. But that’s not something I can find evidence for.” In this class, several students who were making high marks ended up bombing the test that included evolution. These were intelligent people who simply refused to process the material.
All those things have good evidence for them, so of course it’s not brainwashing to teach them. They’re facts, not values.
You know perfectly well what I mean:
But now I understand why you think laws are the solution to the free speech issue. Make political opinion a protected category, and tell Twitter etc that they are not allowed to discriminate against users on that basis. Perhaps that would solve the problem of unaccountable billionaires controlling our discourse.
I think college is a good place to become liberal. What sort of world would it be if young people weren’t impractical and idealistic? That’s how they change the world.
But, I agree that there is a problem with the tribalism that has developed along ideological lines in college. Listening to my nephews and nieces, there is no longer the sense that people who disagree with them have different values or opinions. The sense I get is that the people who disagree with them are to some extent bad people. There is a moral element being added that should not be added.
Conservatives seem to think everyone who disagrees with them is a socialist and a baby murderer, but liberals are the ones adding an improper moral element? 
Are you kidding?
Progressives vilify people who disagree with them plenty.