My application for the Faith and Values Forum

Ms N_
Graduate Research School

Dear Ms N_

I noticed your call for participation in the 9th National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values, to be held in Canberra this September. I’d like to apply as a student representative. I may not be the ideal applicant because I don’t have any faith, but I do have values like you wouldn’t believe. I’d like to tell you about some of them, and you can decide if they stack up favourably.

One of my values is that government should be kept free of religious interference. For that reason, the idea of a leadership forum that leans toward religious faith is deeply unsettling, especially when political leaders are speaking at it.

However, another of my values is to balance my skepticism with open-mindedness. So I try to stay open to the idea that the whole forum might not be a disingenuous attempt to increase religious influence in government using coded religious language with perhaps the goal of taking power from non-religious citizens, funneling federal money to religious groups, and stripping Australia’s citizens of rights they currently enjoy. If I see any evidence at the forum to contradict this view, I’ll be sure and mention it in my report.

But my most important value involves faith. Faith is superfluous, even harmful, to the pursuit of knowledge, and a university has no business promulgating it. Faith feeds on the natural human tendency to see what we expect to see. It is a form of bias that causes the believer to stick with poorly-supported theories. The only reason anyone would need to exercise faith in an idea is if that idea lacks adequate evidence to support it. University students (among which I include myself) need to learn not to hold ideas because of faith, but because of empirical evidence and sound reasoning.

It is these values that I wish to discuss at the forum. Thank you for considering my application. I await your reply.