Following up on Grant Sewell’s interesting discussion of consciousness as a hard problem for Darwinism, and my response:
In “Brave Newark World”, law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:
Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).
In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”
I wrote a letter to Adams because, while I greatly respect the work of groups like The Fire in fighting intellectual oppression, I also think that a critical dimension is missing – the role that materialism inevitably plays in producing the Orwellian conditions is too often ignored:
Dear Dr. Adams,
Thank you for your continuing campaign to expose thought control and brainwashing. I try never to miss one of your excellent and eye-opening articles.
I believe that a good case can be made for the origin of brainwashing in materialist theories of mind.
Let me ask you this: If the university bigwigs believe that the mind is simply the accidental buzz of electrons produced by the activities of the brain (and that is a STANDARD belief among materialists), then why SHOULD they respect their students’ minds?
Of course they attempt instead to direct the meaningless buzz down the desired path – for the same reason as you would wire your house’s electricity in a way that suits your purposes.
A person who believes in the reality of the mind may be willing to die for intellectual freedom, but why should a person who does not believe in the reality of the mind suffer anything AT ALL for intellectual freedom?
That is why so few speak out against the abuses today, surely?
Here is the strange part: Contrary to the PR for materialism that you hear from pop science mags, the news from science does NOT support the materialist view of the mind. Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I demonstrate that in our book, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul.
It surprises me that people do not see more clearly that an inevitable outcome of materialist views is loss of respect for intellectual freedom.
In a materialist framework, the primary problem is not that there is no God but that there is no you in you and no me in me. So the university sees nothing wrong with training its students the way we train a dog – not to be a nuisance to himself or his masters.
To summarize, materialism cannot ground intellectual freedom EXCEPT as a form of mere licence. The right to have ideas other than those approved by the administration is like the right to do dope or pack heat on campus – subject to control or prohibition if things get “out of hand”, in the view of the controllers. And in their view, it always does seem to get out of hand …
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