I dunno. Anyone who’s in the market for a theologically coherent Statement of Faith from Wheaton College, I guess.
Stark raving. But seriously no, not raving. And referring me to a website on monotheism really isn’t going to get you anywhere.
All very interesting as a perspective, but totally irrelevant. The issue isn’t some stuff that happened 2000 years ago, it’s the fact that Wheaton still employs without any problems or concerns other faculty that have said the exact same thing as this lady they wish to fire (that is, that the God worshipped by Christians is the same god as that worshipped by Muslims) no earlier than 2008.
I would have no argument with anyone who, as you have claimed, states that they worship a different god. That’s, of course, their choice. It would put them well outside mainstream Christianity, which overwhelmingly states otherwise, but there is no law against starting your own sect.
What I would argue, is that they have to be at least somewhat internally consistent about it. They can’t reasonably have faculty declaring, in 2008 (and still gainfully employed at Wheaton), that ‘Muslims and Christians worship the same god’, and have the President of the College himself state that such a stance is a matter of one’s own personal qualms, and never once mention that it was “against their statement of faith” - and then, in 2015, decide that the claim is directly contrary to the statement of faith.
It isn’t very credible that the essential basis of the Christian faith (or even the subset of the faith represented by Wheaton) has changed in the seven years between 2008 and 2015, and certainly the Statement of Faith is the same. What is more likely, is that the decision to discipline this lady for making the claim is driven by current events of a distinctly un-theological nature - namely, popular American perceptions of Islam right now.
None of my comment have anything to do with Wheaton’s current employment issue per se.
That’s unreasonable, sure, but that’s baseball: Wheaton College is a private, denominational Christian university. It isn’t bound to uphold standards of academic honesty or freedom to any extent greater than what its students demand of it.
What are we expecting her to fight for, here? The soul of Wheaton College? They’ve already “saved” it, thanks, and any attempts to save it again will be worse than futile. Even if we win this one, we lose: We’d gain a no-name Bible college in flyover country and give the former owners and their allies a wonderful stick to beat us with. “Remember when those Liberals forced a Christan school to cater to Radical Islam? Do you want your church to become a madrassa? Give us money!”
Contrary to what some seem to believe, adulthood isn’t about doing difficult things purely for their own sake. It isn’t about taking on long, arduous fights you ultimately cannot win, which would have dubious or negative value even if you did win them. It’s about picking battles and bypassing fights if at all possible. The greatest victories in the Pacific Theater weren’t at Okinawa or Iwo Jima, they were at the tropical hellholes our island-hopping strategy allowed us to simply go around, winning them without firing a single shot.
If this were a public university, or some school which could reasonably claim an important position in the academic world, it might be worth the struggle. Wheaton College is neither. We might as well be fighting over someone who got sacked from Patriot Bible University for not being precisely the right shade of wackadoo for the kinds of people who’d give a degree to Kent Hovind.
Meh, it is bigger than Wheaton in the context of contemporary criticism of Islam. Lots of Americans are scared and angry, they see the river of images of lunatic Muslims slaughtering… well, somebody, often each other, somewhere in the world, almost every day. Some people are tempted to think Muslim = Terrorist.
Here we have a case where a university is firing a professor who is arguably going the extra mile in exemplifying the values of the institution because the sight of a headscarf gets people’s panties in a bunch.
Princhester, my problem with your responses is that, besides seeming to amount to a collective spleen-vent against religion in general on your part, you seem not to understand who we are talking about. Was the religion made up 2000 years ago? It is more complicated than that, but it doesn’t matter. Evangelicals are not creative, they are dedicated to interpreting what is already there. Evangelicals don’t invent doctrine.
Yes, there is plenty of ambiguity and contradiction in religious texts, especially but not limited to the bible. But monotheism, the particular point we are arguing about, isn’t ambiguous. More importantly, as other posters have pointed out, the Wheaton administration has behaved like they agree with my position in recent years, that is, until they really wanted to sack the woman in the headscarf.
Once again, evangelicals define themselves by what they oppose rather than, say, good works. This isn’t something that happens just at Wheaton- I have been watching them do stuff like this for over 20 years. People ought to take a good look at what that looks like and be wary, it isn’t isolated.
That was well said.
Regards,
Mothra
Wheaton College is run by an example of a loud minority, the kinds of people who think Trump is a good candidate and who aren’t even a majority within the GOP, let alone the country. They’re not going to be convinced because they’re immediately suspicious of anyone who wants to reduce their paranoia: They hate Muslims the way previous generations hated Jews, and they’re not going to change. Fighting them feeds into it, and ignoring them would allow them to fade into irrelevancy.
She has an employment contract with this place, and she has been granted tenure by it. That means they can’t just fire her ass because they don’t like the shape of it. They have to have “cause”.
If their allegation of “cause” amounts to ‘you are the wrong type of wackadoo’ as you (and they) claim, them maybe, yeah, there is an argument that it doesn’t matter very much.
However, if I am right, that claim is bullshit. In that case, they are alleging a difference in flavor of wackadoo purely as a disguise to hide their true motive, which is straight-up bigotry.
I think I have the better argument here, as their claim that the prof’s statement is contrary to their religion has, I believe, proven to be nonsense.
What you appear to be saying is that a religious institution ought to get away with firing people (presumably, without penalty) out of motives of bigotry (if they recite the right mumbo-jumbo), just because religion is all nonsense anyway, so you can’t be bothered to think very deeply about it; allowing people to be fired out of bigotry isn’t important; and it will piss off other Christian colleges if they are called on their bigotry.
Can’t say I agree with that.
I don’t know if you’re conflating tenure with employment contracts or if tenure actually has the force you’re attributing to it, but I will say this: If they’re actually breaking the law or a contract, they should be busted for that. It is also the case that religious institutions have broad latitude to discriminate based on religion, and that includes simple bigotry as long as they obey the law. More.
You seem to be confusing tactics with morality. Morally, I am opposed to bigotry. Tactically, this isn’t a hill worth dying on. The law enforces minimum standards of behavior and there are damned few ways to force people to become morally good individuals, or to even fake it acceptably well. Especially if they think they’re already good people fighting the good fight. This isn’t so much about being unable to legislate morality as different groups being unable to agree on what morality even is in this case: Even if we could legislate morality, we’d have a serious problem here.
Facts are not moral or immoral. They are facts. People do not become immoral by acknowledging the existence of facts you consider immoral.
It’s obvious you know nothing about Wheaton College.
The genuine fanatics at Wheaton are far too low-energy to be worthy of supporting TRUMP-they prefer the Cuban Canadian Communist spy.
None of those things proves it’s a valuable institution in a broad sense. Does it do research? Does it advance any academic fields? It’s a good undergrad school, which has some value, but the fact it’s not only explicitly religious but explicitly denominational means it can only ever reach those undergrads who are not only members of that sect but also want to go to a school which explicitly caters to that sect, instead of branching out even as far as a state school.
I keep waiting for Jeb‽ to resurrect the “Soviet Canuckistan” jibe.
You weren’t just asserting that Wheaton wasn’t a top-of-the-line research university but that it was a “no-name Bible college in flyover country” and compared to a diploma mill like Kent Hovind’s “alma mater” Patriot University. So are all liberal arts colleges and other non-research oriented private institutions of limited to no value?
It’s not denominational-it attracts students from throughout the broad spectrum of Evangelical Christianity be they Southern Baptists, non-denominational, Pentecoastal, Presbyterian, Methodist etc. And most schools that aren’t large public schools do tend to cater to specific segments of the population-is anybody going to deny that say Wellsley or Vassar primarily attracts the scions of the culturally liberal segment of the urban-suburban, largely white and Asian American professional upper-middle class caste?
Personally, I think far too many people these days are willing to sweep injustice under the rug when the victim is a Muslim*.
First they came for the Muslims, and I said nothing…
*Or a Christian who expresses compassion for downtrodden, innocent-yet-slandered Muslims and seeks to build some solidarity with them, for their benefit, at her own expense.
Perhaps instead of dismissing my admittedly bluntly expressed points as being spleen vents you should read them carefully. I don’t sugarcoat my points but they are not mere rants.
Evangelicals are like (indeed usually are) reactionaries; they invent doctrine all the time. It’s just that they invent a golden past that never existed and think we should go back to it. That is not uninventive. They are also inventive in the way they convince themselves that they are following the bible to the letter while absolutely not doing so as I demonstrated in my essentially uncontradicted first response to you. Finally they are extremely tribal and if they need to decide their god is different to that of Others, they are capable of doing it.
As to your monotheism point, you are trying to haul yourself up by your bootstraps. Your point just begs the question; you can’t prove that it would be impossible for a group of religious people to change their religion because then they wouldn’t be monotheistic, which they used to be. Perhaps they aren’t any more. Or perhaps they don’t believe the deity of Muslims to exist. You try to inject too much rationality and consistency into what is, after all, a bunch of fairytales.
But you treat the repetition of your point that it is all fairy tales as a panacea answer to everything, denying that there is internal consistency to the systems of thought of religious denominations.
I did answer your Leviticus point. There are further passages in the bible that give evangelicals a way out of those commandments. They aren’t made-up on the spot answers either, they have been the same answers for who knows how many decades. You simply handwaved it away out of your disdain for all religions, which you cannot then turn around and place on my shoulders as my problem- you are the one not following along on this point.
They are tribal and reactionary, yes, and a lot of other things besides, but the declaration that the god of Others doesn’t exist- in the case of Jews and Muslims- is not an evangelical position. You are thinking of groups more along the lines of the Charismatics (who, believe it or not, are actually more annoying than evangelicals, though I never hear anything from them since escaping the Midwest, thank God). Again, the administration at Wheaton itself has demonstrated this by its past behavior, as multiple posters have tried to point out to you.
I am not trying to prove that “it would be impossible for a group of religious people to change their religion,” we are talking specifically about evangelicals, who, again, you apparently have the good fortune of not being especially well acquainted with. You are being reactionary and essentially creating a strawman out of your own assumptions about how religious groups operate. That is a common mode of ignorance, but don’t take that as an insult. I envy you for never having had to deal with these people up close.
Don’t you Niemoller me, you yahoo. I never said the protest was morally wrong, just ill-advised and doomed to fail, regardless of how much help she got.
No, only the ones who throw out tenured professors for expressing their honest opinions. Whatever cachet this place used to have is gone. It’s now a Single-Issue Institution: That College What Hates Muslims.
At this point, calling it a clown college would be an insult to wherever clowns go to learn their art.
It plays both kinds of music: Country and Western! I still can’t see what makes this place so unique it’d be worth the fight to save it from itself.
First, I’d bet all of the Seven Sisters make a point of taking tokens of all varieties on scholarships of various kinds. Second, none of them would dream of explicitly taking positions which make nontrivial portions of society feel unwelcome.
Nope, you still don’t get it. Sure, it’s all a fairy tale. That’s only part of the point. The other point is, it’s not internally consistent, in either written tradition or (even more notably) practice. I gave you the key example in this respect: the shoehorning of the completely inconsistent Jesus tradition into the older tradition. You haven’t dealt with this point in any way whatsoever, most likely because you can’t.
It is fair to say I didn’t deal with your rebuttal sufficiently but that is because I neglected to do so, not because I can’t. I haven’t heard evangelicals use Romans 13:1, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” the way you say they do. But assuming they do so it just illustrates my point; Romans 13:1 used this way would not in any way illustrate that bible literalists are actually literalists. It would be, at best, an illogical and disingenuous attempt to get out of literalism.
For example, do literalists think that selling daughters into slavery is morally justified, or that their neighbours *should *be put to death for working on the Sabbath? No they do not. Per Romans 13:1 literalists may be excused from actually selling daughters or killing neighbours because they are subject to the governing authorities. That is no answer to the fact they should believe those things to be moral, which they don’t.
Further (and even more compellingly) Romans 13:1 would be no excuse at all for an actual literalist to refrain from following those activities in Leviticus that are not prohibited by the governing authorities: why don’t they sacrifice bulls on altars? Why do they have contact with their wives when their wives are menstrually unclean? Why do they eat shellfish, touch pigs, get their hair cut?
I’ll tell you why - they aren’t literalists at all. They do what they want. They will decide their god is not the god of the towelheads if they want.
There’s a definitions manual somewhere that lays down what it is and what it is not to be an evangelical is there? And even if there were, Wheaton is conclusively bound to follow that manual by what, exactly?
Wheaton have stated their faith position. If you think their position should be something else, too bad. There is no authority to which to appeal, sorry. Least of all some farcical argument that religion is or ever has been consistent, or that there is some canonical backstory they must follow.