The dangers of it:
It is troubling that smarter people are often worse off, because they cannot recognise the biases and blunders, due to a deep, complex layer of justification they’ve narrated to themselves. It’s troubling because we expect smart people to be the ones devoid of biases more than others. However, expectation as usual takes a backseat to evidence. Perhaps all we should expect of intelligence, however you conceive it, is a way of thinking, not the content of thought. This means, even if the belief is quite absurd, the methods to get to it can be smart (sophisticated theology is like this to me). But that’s just one way and assuming one kind of definition of intelligence, which is notoriously difficult to study, let alone quantify.
However, this confirms something more practical to me. As Lehrer says, we’re good at picking out the flaws in others. If this is true, this confirms my earlier view that we shouldn’t want a world in which agreement is everywhere. We must welcome criticism and argument, since, no matter how smart we are (indeed, as this indicates, especially considering how smart we might be), we could be wrong. We are, fundamentally, flawed and fallible.
Yes, it’s quite mistaken to think that people who believe in God are stupid, but many devout atheists seem to do so.
I am unsure what a “devout atheist” might be, but I’m an atheist. I’ve never thought religious people were stupid; I have friends and family who are very adamant and pious Christians who are also quite intelligent and well-educated. Religion is an emotional decision, not intellectual. It is, in most cases, a flinching away from the reality of the void. Everyone does so, but people handle their mortality in different ways. I have my own way of coping. Most people use religion because it’s handy and it’s comforting; no contemplation or deep questions involved. Just accept it, ignore that scary void, and move on with your life.
Believe me, the emotional aspect is seductive even to atheists, but I can’t honestly accept it, no matter how appealing it may be to my hindbrain. That doesn’t mean I judge people as inferior because they can accept it. If anything, I envy them a little. I submit to you that militant, anti-religious atheists are those who can’t accept their envy — and would probably deny it if confronted with the idea.
Perhaps rather than “devout,” I should have said “evangelistic” — that is, someone who tries to convince others that there is no God.
Thank you. As a Christian, I have often found an assumption in pseudo-intellectual atheists less mature than yours, assuming that I am stupid or uneducated because I am a Christian. I actually for many years have kept an article from the cover of USA Today detailing the trial of Eric Rudolph, where he was characterized as a Christian (despite a quote that he prefers to read Nietzsche to the Bible, so I don’t know how devout he is) and then a phrase to the effect of, “despite being a devout Christian, he appears remarkably well-read and educated.” I was on the road with a colleague, and I expressed my shock at the statement, and he looked me in the eye and said something like, “Well, yeah. That’s right.” I don’t like playing the victim, but I keep the article to remind me that I’m often in “hostile territory”.
Richard Dawkins, the puritanical atheist who wrote “The God Delusion”, is a great example of this, particularly because Moldbug completely disects Dawkins’s own faith-based beliefs for all to see.
“Most people use religion because it’s handy and it’s comforting; no contemplation or deep questions involved. Just accept it, ignore that scary void, and move on with your life. ”
There most certainly is contemplation and deep questions involved in religion. Usually people find their way into a religion by contemplation and asking deep questions.
Being a Christian in 2012 America is something like being a Negro in the Jim Crow South: we’re the majority of the population, but we’d best know our place.
I dunno, I haven’t really seen that much persecution for being a Christian. An occasional insult, but not even that much condescension from people. Admittedly, the main intellectual elites I deal with on a regular basis are fellow space nerds. I see a lot more religious conviction and sneering condescension directed towards people who disagree on choice of destination or propellant combo than I do from people making fun of my religious beliefs. And heck, I’m Mormon, so I should be a pretty easy target, no?
~Jon
The more appropriate comparison is, I think, with being gay. Religious belief, unlike skin color, is not immediately apparent to the casual observer, and Christian religious practice and moral standards overlap pretty strongly with the general cultural norms of Western civilization (not by coincidence, that). So if you don’t “out” yourself, red-state Americans will assume that you are obviously a Christian like all decent people, and blue-state Americans that you are obviously a secular humanist of some sort, ditto.
What happens if you do out yourself, depends quite a bit on where you do so, and even more on how. As with homosexuality, lots of people don’t care what you do in private but really don’t want to hear the details.
John, I agree with your comment overall, but a quibble: “blue-state Americans” would be crazy to assume random strangers are secular humanists of some sort, and I’m quite sure that they don’t, in fact, make that assumption.
Look at this map to see why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Religious_Belief_in_North_America.png
No comedy intended regarding the coloration of that map. I’m just saying that people living in states which went for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama are also quite likely to be religious.
If, by “blue state Americans”, you meant “computer scientists who read hard science fiction and read sci.space in the 1980s”, ok, then sure.
No, but I am counting Christmas-and-Easter “Christians” as secular humanists of a sort. People who are not religious by any usual sense of the term, people whom Richard Dawkins would gladly invite to dinner, frequently give a positive answer to the question, “Do you believe in God?” – then forget the whole business.
The more relevant map, from the same source, would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Church_or_synagogue_attendance_by_state_GFDL.svg
It is possible to be religious without regularly attending church, or vice versa, but your preferred approach of setting the bar at the explicit rejection of any religious identity or affiliation is I think not particularly informative.
That’s the most cogent, on target, truth filled thing I’ve EVER heard about Christians in America circa 2012. Thank you and a tip of the hat B. Lewis, I will quote you and give you credit for that statement! I’ve honestly searched for the words but I totally missed it.
You did not.
If you don’t have humility, you’re not that smart.
LOL. As of a few weeks ago, I have a new rule of thumb: “I won’t listen to a scholar who is not yet mature enough to say, ‘I don’t know’.”
Smart, maybe.
Wise, no.
The two get conflated (especially by the smart-and-foolish) far too often…
Speaking from personal experience, a larger problem than being smart is thinking you are smarter than you actually are. (long story)
Well, that’s just what YOU think, John 🙂
This is what the great philospher Herman Kahn called “Educated Incapacity.”
http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2219
If being smart is dangerous then I’m the Evel Knievel of intellectualism. ^_^
Awful Kenoffle and Icky Kenicky Salute you!
I’m pleased by the praise from such prestigious stunt writers!
Many religious people are incredibly stupid, although there is no evidence that the number who are is any higher a proportion than that of stupid people among atheists.
Evidence for the proposition is the fact that the sort of fake evangelist that appears on TV with thousands of dollars of dental work and wearing a $5,000 suit, having driven to the studio in a Cadillac or Rolls-Royce, continues to make a living in America.
Not just Protestant fundamentalists, either. I wonder how much a full set of Catholic priest’s vestments costs?
“When the first knave met the first fool, then was born the first priest.”
I just wonder what it is about people that make their real hair look fake that stimulates others to give them money?
Churches (and by extension religion) raise tens of billions of dollars for charities all across the world every year. People will talk about the gold chair that the Pope sits on and wonder how many starving people it could feed. But the chair isn’t solid gold. It’s just a very thin gold leaf painted onto the surface. All that wealth you see at the top is just the thin coating of promotional-ism that advertises that particular religions wide base of support. Underneath though is where the real differences are being made in people’s lives.
But oh well….I guess it’s a good thing that secularism would never have to resort to such tactics. When the state gets to dole out all the cradle to the grave goodies; who needs religion? Psssh… It certainly doesn’t lead to fevered voters voting for the president messiah to bring hope and change and pay the phone bill while your at it too.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on one side, Lenin and Mao on the other. I think it’s pretty obvious which side has the monopoly on “incredibly stupid”.
DaveP,
being fans of neither set of liars, I’ll bite, WHICH side has it?
And given that Jim and Tammy scammed and lied and lost it all, Jim went to jail and served his time, while Lenin and Mao killed their OWN people, stole WAY more and lived quite well, while people suffered, until they died naturally deaths, tread carefully pilgrim, tread carefully.
High intelligence has the same problem as four-wheel-drive. It lets you get stuck much farther away from help.
Why do we exist?
“God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.”
– The Baltimore Catechism
Yo, I got this one.
…because our parents had sex… …because their parents had sex…
…because ancient aliens or monkeys or god thought sex would work.
Shorter answer: SEX.
I still get a kick out of the fact that the Big Bang theory was postulated by a priest.
Hmm, I think we exist to buy health insurance. At least that’s according to the scriptures of Obamessiah.