If You Never Question, You Never Learn

One of the basic goals of edu­ca­tion is for a stu­dent to be able to ask thought­ful ques­tions, but if this op-ed col­umn is any indi­ca­tion, then the atmos­phere at col­lege cam­puses may be turn­ing toxic:

Dis­tin­guished schol­ars at sev­eral major uni­ver­si­ties in the United States have been con­demned, even sub­jected to death threats, for propos­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal, soci­o­log­i­cal or anthro­po­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions of reli­gious texts in their classes and pub­lished writ­ings. In the most egre­gious cases, defend­ers of the faith insist that only true believ­ers are qual­i­fied to teach their reli­gious tradition.

Any­one who is secure in his reli­gious or polit­i­cal beliefs will not mind skep­ti­cal ques­tions. After all, if you’re right then no one can prove you wrong, correct?

Besides, study­ing a reli­gious text from aca­d­e­mic stand­point does not under­mine that writing’s deeper mean­ing. I know that the Torah, for exam­ple, was com­posed and edited over many cen­turies by many dif­fer­ent — and largely anony­mous — peo­ple, but that does take away from the deeper philo­soph­i­cal and moral mes­sages of that col­lec­tion of texts. If I am able to put those writ­ings in their cor­rect his­tor­i­cal, lin­guis­tic and social con­texts, then I under­stand them that much better.

But that would be too much for those who believe that the text of their reli­gion is the lit­eral, divine “Word of God” whose mean­ings have not changed despite cen­turies of changes, trans­la­tions, redac­tions and debates over what the words mean and which books should even be included.