Today we'll look at some other examples he gives in his article on the topic at The Daily Signal where he focuses on some of the bizarre deliverances of the Stanford University administration. He writes:
Stanford University, a thoroughly secular institution, ... released an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” It informs all Stanford faculty and students of “harmful” words they should avoid and the words that should replace them. Some examples:Furthermore, it's not just that the beliefs held by secular folks about their religious fellow citizens are irrational - they're often false. The belief that religious people (primarily Christians) have been uniquely murderous throughout history is a good example. Prager points out that in the last century alone 100 million people were murdered by atheistic regimes.
Stanford asks its students and faculty not to call themselves “American.” Rather, they should call themselves a “U.S. citizen.” Why? Because citizens of other countries in North America and South America might be offended.
Stanford asks its faculty and students not to use the term “blind study.” Why? Because it “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Instead, Stanford faculty and students should say “masked study.”
Two questions: Is Stanford’s claim that being blind is not a disability rational or irrational? And what percentage of those who make this claim are secular?
The list of irrational (and immoral) things secular people believe—and religious people do not believe—is very long. As a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton puts it: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”
He makes an important, and ultimately amusing, observation when he notes that "the religious beliefs that most people call 'irrational' are not irrational; they are unprovable." He gives an example:
[The] beliefs that there is a transcendent Creator and that this Creator is the source of our rights are not irrational; they are unprovable. Atheism — the belief that everything came from nothing — is considerably more irrational than theism.
[Moreover] human beings are programmed to believe in the non-rational. Love is often non-rational — love of our children, romantic love, love of music and art, love of a pet. Our willingness to engage in self-sacrifice for another is often non-rational — from the sacrifices children make for parents and parents for children to the sacrifices made by non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.
What good religion does is provide its adherents with a moral, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually deep way to express the non-rational. Therefore, they can remain rational everywhere outside religion. The secular, having no religion within which to innocuously express the non-rational, often end up doing so elsewhere in life.
So only the religious believe that “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” but they do not believe that men give birth.
Meanwhile, the irreligious don’t believe that “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” but only they believe that men give birth.
