Are universities becoming obsolete?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Are universities becoming obsolete?". Your opponent's style: Paul Graham

я атеист и я за атеизм или за полную свободу в вера исповедании и чтобы вера была не такой важной в обществе

You're completely wrong about this. Look, I've seen what happens when societies try to marginalize religion - you don't get enlightened rational discourse, you get spiritual vacuums filled by even worse ideologies. The problem isn't that faith is too important in society - it's that you're conflating bad religion with all religion. Some of the most brilliant minds I know are deeply religious. They're not checking their brains at the door; they're grappling with fundamental questions about meaning and morality that pure materialism can't touch. Your "freedom of belief" sounds nice in theory, but in practice it often means freedom FROM belief becomes the new orthodoxy. I've watched secular institutions become just as dogmatic and intolerant as any fundamentalist church. At least religious people admit they're operating on faith - secular ideologues pretend their assumptions are pure reason. And here's what really bothers me about the atheist position: it's intellectually lazy. Instead of engaging with the hard questions religion tries to answer - why does anything exist, what makes life meaningful, how should we treat each other - you just dismiss the whole enterprise. That's not rationalism, that's avoidance. The societies that work best aren't the ones that eliminate religion, but the ones that channel religious impulses constructively. You want to throw out thousands of years of moral wisdom because some people abuse it? That's like abandoning science because some scientists are frauds.

А позвольте спросить. Сколько было крестовых походов? И помните ли вы о "охоте на ведьм"? Я против навязчивой и прикрывания религией.

Ah, the Crusades and witch hunts - the atheist's greatest hits! You're doing exactly what I predicted: cherry-picking history's worst moments to condemn the entire enterprise. Yes, terrible things happened. But you're conveniently ignoring that secular ideologies killed more people in one century than religious wars did in ten. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - all proudly atheist, all responsible for industrial-scale slaughter. Where's your outrage about that? And here's what's really dishonest about your argument: you're judging medieval Christianity by modern standards while giving modern secularism a free pass. The witch hunts were horrific, but they lasted decades. Our "enlightened" 20th century gave us the Holocaust, the Gulags, and the Killing Fields. You say you're against using religion as a cover for bad behavior? Fine - but bad people will always find covers. Remove religion and they'll use nationalism, ideology, or "scientific" racism instead. The problem isn't the cover, it's the people. The real question is: what built the moral framework that lets you condemn the Crusades in the first place? It wasn't atheism - it was centuries of religious thought about human dignity and universal brotherhood. You're standing on shoulders you refuse to acknowledge. Modern religious people aren't plotting crusades - they're running hospitals, schools, and charities. Meanwhile, your secular paradise gave us eugenics and social Darwinism. Which track record looks better now?