Do Atheists really consider Christians less intelligent?

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Rather than being so restrictive and doctrinaire, for about the last 15 years, atheism has been accepting every last claim, of every last superstition. You can say that Moses crossed the Red Sea, at just the right moment, and it closed upon the Egyptians, but by accident. They can believe in Santa Claus, just so long as you give it a materialistic explanation.

Besides just appropriating the religion, itself, for the cause of materialism, they also appropriate the holiday. People will be deluged, say, on Easter, with this line of speculation.

The two kinds of atheists, imo --

skeptic on a stick


everything but Jesus


But, ultimately, the lack of critical reasoning can be called religion, not matter who isn't doing it.

I didn't know that I was disagreeing with you but now that you put it that way I'd say I have to.

My understanding of materialism, as a cultural artifact rather than a philosophy of science, is that it's divided into a lot of scattered camps. There are clearly people who just don't like what their religious relatives have to say and so since it's anti-religious they wave it in the air as a self-defense weapon. Similarly you have some in the science and philosophy of science community who've gotten confused over just how sound/unsound the the philosophy of matieralism/physicalism is based on the current facts on the ground and consequently they've entrenched themselves in it somewhat religiously. Technically the later are a block to scientific progress itself because if they'd humbug anything out that they don't like then they're stuck with the measurement problem, dark matter and dark energy, the state of scientific progress as it was in the 1980's or 1990's, and they won't be able to hack something that moves away from them and toward something like a non-reductive or even more purely functionalist (ie. neither quite materialist nor idealist) coming to pass.

A lot of the myriad quantum theories that don't even speak to the same fundamental universe but make radical departures with the same data both tell us how little we know and also seem to suggest that the way we try to hand-wave away certain things that don't meet the current narrative means that the current narrative and interpretation of the data need a critical rethink.


Speaking more directly to culture than to science:

As far as I can tell science is leading away from reductive materialism, ie. it's a dead end. I do think the pseudoskeptics and more knee-jerk antitheists, which the internet is full of, are as ignorant and superstitious as anyone else. They're just betting on the horse that's most bet on at present and consequently they can know even less about the world, about science, or philosophy than a Christian or other theist but feel an unearned smugness or superiority to that person because they have the authority of societal establishment behind their backs.

I think when consensus about reductive materialism failing starts to become establishment-wide you'll start seeing this sort of goofiness go away. It's not that extraordinary claims won't need either extraordinary evidence or very sharp reinterpretations of ordinary claims to deflate the 'extraordinary' perception of a claim.

Mind you I write all of that as someone who, when I really have to evaluate my experiences, is forced to admit that I've had interactions with spirits, possibly even angels or minor deities.

I do think that there are a lot of good theories out there coming up that both keep their scientific rigor and also cease to call religious people, ghost experiencers, NDE'ers, or experiencers of psychic phenomena lunatics. I mean I might rephrase part of that - dogmatic believers in every jot and tittle of 2000 year old books probably won't fare well in that analysis, just that the evidence for the validity of everyone's experiences seems to be growing even if our interpretations of those experiences may be challenged.

The things I'd say about Jesus or the concept of logos from where I stand:

The idea seems to be that you can divide the universe in the active and passive, the active initiates motion and the passive receives this as a medium of reference.

The cosmic logos is seen as the cosmic self-conscious rather than subconscious. This also hearkens back to what I've learned of the Hermetic doctrines in the tarot - ie. the male figures are symbolic of conscious forces, the female figures are depictions of subconscious forces.

The two interact constantly but ultimately its the job of conscious analysis to both inform the subconscious and in the broader sense tame and properly curate nature. Adam's first wife was Lilith, ie. a planet where he was getting eaten by all kinds of large predatory cats, bears, etc.. When Eve came from 'his own rib', and when Cain killed Abel, you have the agricultural revolution where yes - there were still problems, nature was red in tooth and nail then and still is today, just that we weren't being dominated by it rather it was more subservient to us than threatening our existence.

That doesn't mean that we didn't have our own problems in terms of humanity praying on itself through constant warfare, it just means that we have more work to do and more ways in which mind needs to inform nature and vice a verse. People with totalitarian utopian ideas get it wrong in believing that mind can obliterate the laws of nature or it makes the mistake of believing that laws of nature, both physical and human psychological, won't be important - ie. that the land can be bulldozed to conform to the map. It doesn't work like that and so most of Adam's current sins/errors against Eve are in that category, ie. not knowing her well enough and having his actions consequently come back to bite him.

That's part of why I really think our science is important, it's one critical way in which we get to know what you could call the Cosmic Mother on much more clear and precise terms, as well as getting to know the Cosmic Father within ourselves (such as understanding motivated reasoning and all the perceptual flaws and navigation traps our reasoning and logic can fall into). It really shouldn't be taking anything away from us and if we feel inclined to resort to nihilism what we're really suffering from is a failure of imagination more than a failure of options.

I find this very fascinating but this is also where I get confused. I think the natural arrangement of things on our planet isn't commonly found elsewhere. Bears and people, for example, wouldn't be on another planet (and if so, we have yet to discover it so we wouldn't know if this is a truth), and the cosmic male to female thing doesn't make much sense to me either. The way I see sexuality is just two variants of a single organism which combine to repopulate a space, and they do this until the resource cap is hit in said space. For this to be duplicated cosmically doesn't make sense either. Also, I've never once seen a cosmic father in my life. I don't disagree, or agree, with anything you've said, but I'm mainly confused by it.

Though I don't believe in these things, I also still have an imagination. I would say I'm a fairly good composer and an artist, I'm fascinated by the different forms of architecture found globally, both modernistic and traditional, and I also believe that many of the worlds religions can exist, because nothing says they can't, but I don't tell myself they're an absolute certainty.

From what you're saying it sounds like your grasp on Darwinian evolution probably needs some aid. An apex predator or apex conscious animal in any particular environment won't be the first animal to evolve. Really any animal with comparative advantages of power is unlikely to need enough intelligence to go get to the point where we are - ie. self-referencing. I remember reading studies that suggest that in the last 100,000 or perhaps from the beginning of cro-magnon man we've lost brain mass comparable to size of a softball. the reason being is that humans at that time had to memorize insane quantities of data in order to survive. Brains and intelligence are highly expensive and, as far as evolution goes, not parsimonious. Various scientific thinkers along this line also believe that, as our technologies improve, our brains will shrink proportionately to what we can outsource to data libraries. So intelligence, particularly to the agree to discuss intelligence, is not something that the oceans sponges of 800 million years ago could have had the stimulus or proximate cause to need.


It's an interpretation of religious narratives in the west. If you look at the history of western philosophy regarding religion, particularly the esoteric strains, this is what it centers around and you'll see parallels to these ideas in Hinduism.

The thing that might help you understand this better is classifications, like if you were to partition your hard drive into two main folders, or three main folders, and attempting to sort your files by the type of content they have. The masculine/feminine or active/passive was a historical and philosophic way of thinking about dynamics in nature. We had ourselves to look at, ie. male and female as well as male and female qualities, and we extrapolated outward. Seeing the sun's involvement in raising crops (ie. wheat doesn't grow well in a cave) and seeing the moon's effect on the tides also made it seem quite logical that if there were five other things we could see wandering around the sky at night, ie. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, that they quite likely had effects on our world as well - hence astrology, as well as astrotheology in the sense of the seven's of the bibles and the names for the days of the week - Sunday, Monday (Lunes), Tuesday (Martes), Wednesday (Miercoles), Thursday (Jueves), Friday (Viernes), and Saturday. This is also part of how the sun was seen as masculine, ie. fertilizing, and the moon (and earth) were seen as feminine due to their receipt of light or receipt of fertilization from the sun.

My biggest problem with the way philosophy and religion is taught in colleges is that they take a lot of the ancient philosophers, study their beliefs like dusty museum curiosities or specimens in formaldehyde jars, and quite often completely ignore going over their students how many of these beliefs we still hold in some abstracted form. To make my own guess I have to think this was the influence that protestant Christianity had on science in a particular disdain for anything 'pagan' and the burying of any curiosity to compare Christianity to its roots - thus we compartmentalized. The evidence that Christianity is a solar logos religion, based on Judaism which is a religion of the constellations and planets, seems overwhelming. I do think it's sad that people have killed each other for thousands of years over astrology, and now kill each other over whether or not Mohammed had an uncle, but that's probably a conversation for another time.

What I'd say is that thinking about the universe in terms of masculine and feminine isn't necessarily wrong, just that you could try this on per say: name the two parts of the universe, name the three parts of the universe, name the seven parts of the universe, the twelve parts of the universe, the 22 parts of the universe, etc. etc. etc. - you probably get my drift. You'll generally find that if you have to lump a thing into just two categories a certain trait will take preeminence, if it's three you'll probably have something like two opposites and a synergy (ie. Hegel). I'm not going to suggest that this directly implies any 'woo', just that it does seem to compel the architecture of information. Going back to the category of twos and masculine/feminine you also see this in the Yin-Yang where you see each swirling around the other and each initiating the motion of the other because each has the seed of the other within it.


I'm really not a fan of 'belief' or 'believing in' things, particularly when the first few examples most people would think of - like Jesus or Santa Clause - are pejorative. I like diving into the history of human ideas and asking myself whether they're pragmatically useful or whether they do highlight an important set of truths about the universe we live in or our relationship to it. The cosmic mother and father story is a very ancient trope and I think it's a very valuable prism to understanding religion, not just Judao-Christian but also stories like those of Marduk and Tiamat of the Sumerian tradition, or the way Jordan Peterson has looked inferred order vs. chaos which is a slightly different take but in the case of the Sumerian creation myth and Marduk carving up Tiamat it's probably quite appropriate.

I think the point I'm getting at is the same point that Yuval Harari made in his book Homo Deus - human beings are creatures of story, creatures who live on and are organized by big memes. The older the meme gets quite often the more raw, primal, and powerful it tends to be. This was human thinking hot off the press and loaded with viceral intensity, the kind of intensity that you might have some reflection today with African, Caribbean, or Korean Christians or Afro-Caribbean esotericists (who bring the same sort of religious fervor to their practices quite often as Koreans do to their non-denominational Christianity).

As for what's 'real' vs. pragmatic - I think the movement of physics, particticularly as philosophy of science shifts, from blunt materialism to something with a much heavier emphasis on data, or what you might call late 19th century/early 20th century functionalism where neither mind nor matter are necessarily preeminent. We're forced in this direction partly because the loose ends over the question of what is consciousness pushes us toward either radical emergence or panpsychism, both of which are deeply unsatisfying in their 'just-so' plug nature and either lack of predictive power or their request for miracles. Similarly the measurement problem can't have a spooky ending - claiming that the double slit justifies The Secret or trying to hand-wave it away by suggesting that it means nothing puts us in a dilemma where we either go right back to superstition or end up at a dead-end in terms of scientific inquiry.

Too bad. Without the crusades we wouldn't have Sharia law or Islamic terrorism.

Before the crusades the Muslims were some of the most advanced people in the world. But a century of war made them hostile. It didn't help that the cursaders burned down their great libraries and universities.


The trouble was, it was the classical writings brought back by the crusaders that lead to the renaissance and the scientific revolution and eventually the industrial revolution. Without the crusades, only the Muslims would have those writings. Without the crusades, the Imams wouldn't have declaired those writings to be haram. Without the crusdes, they would have have launched the age of navel exploration and colonized the world from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Without the crusades, they would have had the industrial revolution. Without the crusades, Islam would now be the main religion on Earth.

Last edited by RetroGamer87 on 23 Apr 2017, 5:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Right.... because the Persian polymaths weren't conquestees, they were true and deep believers of the Muslim faith and everything would have been perfect if it wasn't for those meddling European imperialists who permanently perverted their will to do good comparable to the United State's defilement of Fidel Castro's sainthood!

Don't get me wrong, it makes for a very warm and fuzzy social justice narrative. Shame it's not true.

Even just jumping to Wikipedia for common knowledge on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

It was a particular family of Caliphs in Baghdad who funded the education project and their reign was ended by Mongol invasion.

Another article drawing the distinction between the Persian Golden Age and Quranic Islam which also implies Sunni philosophy as having defeated the philosophers based on the value of simplicity:
http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/12/03/the ... olden-age/

Ok so it was the Mongols, not the crusaders. My bad.

Anyway, a comparison between the Islamic golden age and the later history of Islam is a good demonstration of how anti-intellectualism can weaken an advanced society. It's a good warning for us.

So does radical Islam come from Sunni or Shia?

Apparently the fall of the Persian Caliphate Golden Age is largely attributed to Al-Ghazali (1058 - 1111) who defeated the logic of the philosophers with the simplicity of divine revelation in much the same way that the early Catholic patriarchs defeated the neoplatonists of the time with the simplicity and elegance of the Christian salvation narrative which strictly needed profession of faith and submission to the revelation of the bible rather than complicated metaphysical models of how the universe and human thought worked.

This is also why I think science will always keep its gates at least somewhat guarded and be wary of religion, as will the philosophies. The precedent for simplicity washing away complexity (ie. evolutionary or cultural fitness defeating complex truth) has a long history of success and it seems to show that the average person is built much better for simple narratives than they are for the sciences.

People want to follow something, i get it. They aren't ready to see that it's the wrong thing to focus on, they are wasting their brain on something that only contributes to suffering and greed.
Treating people like human beings shouldn't revolve around who they tell their secrets too. If you get offended for your god, you're in too deep, hell if you get offended for your football team your're in too deep.

I have more of an issue with people who deny science those are the idiots playing right into the hands of he industries that are killing them, if they do that behind a veil of god i have no time for them.

I believe in Math... Math does everything, and still there is more math.

Did you even read what I wrote? I said without the crusades to weaken the Muslims they would have been more effective conquerers.

I never wrote that the crusades caused the Muslims to become conquerers.

So apparently I'm a social justice warrior now

It boggles my mind though that philosophers have such diverging opinions concerning the universe. How do you know which one is true and which one is not? Or if they are true at all? Complexity doesn't automatically makes something true neither does simpliticity. Hebrew philosophy also does have certain beauty to it, although easy to get into it's hard for one to truly understand. And can take a life-time of studying and someone still wouldn't be able to fully understand certain things.

I was wrong when I said the crusades made the Muslims hostile. They're hostile for seperate reasons. The crusades made them idiots. Without the crusades they'd now be much smarter and still hostile. It's good that we have a primitive enemy. An advanced enemy would be far more dangerous.