The Sublime & Beautiful vs. Reality

This blog is a record of one man's struggle to search for scientific, philosophical, and religious truth in the face of the limitations imposed on him by economics, psychology, and social conditioning; it is the philosophical outworking of everyday life in contrast to ideals and how it could have been.


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The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God
and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
--Johannes Kepler

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Monday, December 13, 2010

Ephemera & Social Philosophy: On higher education

The linked article in this post lays out all the important concepts and realities regarding higher education. The artificial credential inflation has been so effectively programmed into our consciousness that I have had to stop and reprogram myself on many occasions. For example many people I meet are not at my intellectual level and yet they are educated beyond my level and so in society's eyes they are better. And many of my friends that I have intellectual parity with, vary from those with little or no formal education to those who have doctorates, master's, and equivalent degrees, and my education consists of years of trade school and the reading of books; when we ignore this education meme we understand each other quite well. I meet many highly intelligent productive people who are, in the eyes of our culture, uneducated. But, with my exposure to heavy bureaucracy at the Port of Seattle, I meet the other end of the spectrum, and one can only say, "Many people are educated way beyond their intelligence."

This would all be fine and worth filing under signs of the decline, but this same attitude has invaded the church, especially in Presbyterian circles, and thus should be criticized. To many of my own brothers and sisters in the church, I am nothing because I am uneducated. But at least with the true believers in the faith who are my friends and associates, I don't have to deal with this attitude. The church needs to self correct on this (among many other more important issues) so that we are not blinded by our sublimation within the greater culture.

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