Letters to the Editor
debaser
Published Letters: 656 Editor's Choice: 11
-
Third Man
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's all a matter of degrees my friend.
The idea that schools do whatever they can to get your money from you is not news to anyone who ever went to one :)
The difference is, they don't make tens of (hundreds of?) millions of dollars off the average dude that dropped out of his Psych program in Junior year, but they sure do make TONS of money on them athletes...even those who do graduate end up with an essentially useless degree. (somebody here had a few brilliant posts about this about a month back - a professor himself? Amerigo I think?).
Which is not to say that the stats you unearthed aren't interesting, they are...it's just that they don't really contradict the fact that university athletes are used (yes used) by the institutions to make hundreds of millions of dollars and they get very little in return.
cheers,
-
response to the response
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hey Third Man,
Well you clearly have alot more first hand knowledge than I do (i.e none whatsoever). I went to school in Canada at a school without athletic scholarships and where athletics take a VERY back seat to academics (the end result? Our football team hasn't won this century, but we did loose Mike Keenan onto the hockey coaching landscape...so at least we have that going for us :). What struck me about your response is that even if the money isn't as much as you say, it's still TONS more than my school gets (a school of 80,000 mind you) from athletics. Maybe football isn't allowing the executive committee roll around on a bed of crisp hundred dollar bills, but it certainly pays a huge percentage of the general operating budget.
Maybe it's not as much money made as people would suspect, but that doesn't change the fact that there's still alot of money being made on the backs of students that are paid nothing, and often (not always) left by the wayside once their utility to the school is over.
cheers
-
@benthead and 6Stringer
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank You.
30 pages in and I finally read something lucid and coherent.
further to benthead's point: if you're going to trash Catholicism please have an understanding of it that is deeper than second grade catechism...you might actually see that it's a pretty fascinating branch of human thought. Just from a purely historical perspective the evolution (heh) of theology from Augustine to Aquinas to Jan Hus to Luther to Vatican II to Liberation Theology (just to pick out some random plot points) is deeply engrossing and fascinating.
Or maybe that's just a history nerd talking...sitting in a musty library reading an hundred year old copy of Zwingli's sermons appeals to me for some reason :)
My point is, divorce the academia from the implications and you might actually like it - not to mention that some of these dudes are some of the intellectual titans of all time...why not see what they were all about?
cheers,
-
@droogoy
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]you wrote:
"The Rev. Thomas Bokenkotter, in his monograph A Concise History of the Catholic Church, notes (page 17):
“The Gospels were not meant to be a historical or biographical account of Jesus. They were written to convert unbelievers to faith in Jesus as the Messiah, or God.”
This is a shattering admission indeed, and from a historian of Christendom’s largest Church. It is a de facto admission that no historical support exists for any of the accounts in the New Testament. Indeed, if they ‘were not meant to be historical’ (or accurate), then we cannot be sure if any are!"
I hate to wade into this boiler-room, but dude...this is not a "shattering admission" or even news of any kind. You learn this stuff in grade school! The Four Gospels were written with four very different audiences in mind:
Mark for the Romans - Jesus is a heroic figure
Matthew for the Jews - it's all about his fulfilling the prophecies
Luke - To convert the Gentiles, it's all about how he cares for the poor
John - It's the most abstract version, for the intellects (he's the incarnation of The Word and all that jazz)
Regardless, the Catholic Church hasn't proclaimed The Bible as The Unadulterated Word of God since at least The Council of Trent in the 1560s (you're confusing the Catholic Church with the Protestant churches Luther spawned - they're the ones that all about the Sola Scriptura...which was really just a means to wrest power away from Rome, but I digress). There hasn't been any claims to historical accuracy in the bible from Rome in centuries...there is however a rather booming industry in Jewish Archaelogy being based on the Old Testament, but again I digress.
look, you clearly know your stuff about science - that's cool, but you should learn a little bit more about the people you attack, lest you look a bit daft.
cheers!