Can you imagine? “Another example of humans mistakenly believing in divine revelation is [Zhang Dao Ling] [Joseph Smith]. A complicated mix of psychology and cultural factors leads to this type of belief across cultures and history.”
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The faithful are also censored, since Jews believe this about Muslim and Christian revelation, Christians about all non-Abrahamic revelations, etc. There is no discipline where censorial sensitivity takes precedence over truth like religious studies.
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So yes, it's absurd to instruct scientists to lie about the date when indigenous people came to a particular place. But this kind of thing is old hat to religious studies professors (myself included) who censor their own teaching in order to be sensitive.
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And let's be clear: religious studies is not "literary studies". We teach empirical truths. But in a political science class on conspiracy theories, the class assumes and asserts the truth—the theories are false. In a religion class, the truth remains willfully undisclosed.
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And again, a reminder. This holds for, say, Christian professors as much as secular ones. For them, the undisclosed truth is that *other* religious faiths are delusions—the angel Gabriel never came to Mohammed, etc. They are empirically false.
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So it's worth asking: When is it ridiculous to censor truth for the sake of sensitivity, and when is it acceptable? I don't have a good answer, but I think that coming up with one requires recognizing instances of the same that are closer to home. /x
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