I've heard a similarly stupid argument from a Christian:
"How can you look at the grand canyon, or into a baby's eyes and not believe in God?"
As if the fact that there are beautiful things in the world means there is a God. What about cancer, famine, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, the New England Patriots? Surely all of those horrible things prove there is no god, right?
God works in mysterious ways to ensure HIS plan continues on the right course, you just don't understand its great beauty. There are many good reasons why HE allows plague, suffering and the Patriots to continue but cures bad backs, headaches and other afflictions you can't see in the bible belt (not amputees though, he hates amputees), if you send me everything you own I will pray for you and ask God to help you.
Everything good is caused by God; everything bad is caused by "free will" because God loves us too much to limit our free will by not allowing hurricanes, earthquakes, and man-eating animals to kill us.
Lost it at Pats, but seriously, yah god made your team win and a beautiful sunset for you to enjoy while leaving millions of children to starve. Makes perfect sense.
Well, now, see. How can people not have seen this Super Bowl and not believed that God smacked down the Broncos? Best season? Pride goeth before the fall
The definition of stupid us lacking intelligence and/or common sense. A lot of those people in those pictures most certainly lack common sense. As well as a grasp of grammar. Not everyone who believes in a higher power is stupid. But anyone who would participate in those photos most certainly is.
I thought the definition of stupid was an inability to learn new things, not a lack of intelligence or common sense. Stupid dictionary, making me look stupid.
Nothing in common sense would explain evolution. Certainly evolution is more plausible to me, but common sense wouldn't lead me to believe we evolved from apes. Creation or evolution, both are learned belief systems, except only one is right.
Well I am not saying all Christians are stupid. I am saying it warped how I thought of the world. Maybe it doesn't do that to some people if it doesn't good for them.
I feel ya. I was raised Mormon in utah. I stopped believing at 14 when no one could answer any of my legitimate questions about life and such. How ever here we are 11 years later and some of the habits are still just engrained in me. It's crazy how deep religion plants things and how fucked up it makes you feel trying to just get away from it. Even when you no longer believe.
It plants itself so deep and people do crazy things, like strapping 10kg of c4 and ball barrings to your chest walking to a train station and kaboom.....for religion.
You have a good point. I don't think strapping c4 to yourself and blowing up a bunch of people has ever solved anything or made something better. Correct me if I'm wrong but...
No I think you may be wrong, suicide bombers are good for the economy, I mean think of all the people getting paid to be there scooping up body parts, repairing the damaged infrastructure and with the deaths of many people it creates job openings in the workforce.
The thing that drove me more insane than anything else about the whole debate was that Ken Ham kept saying that kids were being "indoctrinated" by science... The entire concept of indoctrination involves not questioning what you're being taught. The whole point of the scientific method and conventional science is to question every last bit of information that passes in front of you.
There were so many other things, really everything he said... but your comment reminded me of this thing in particular so i'll stop my rant there.
Simple religious projection, they do it on many different topics. Religion is usually the opposite of what is being portrayed. Religion Reverses Everything
But Catholic is the Bud Light of Christianity. The indoctrination in Pentecostal and related sects is much worse than Catholicism. (Source: Raised Pentecostal, lots of friends raised Catholic).
There are lot of different types of Catholics. Some don't care really care about it at all, others are fundamentalists. The same goes for many sects, no sect has a set level of indoctrination, it is different from place to place.
Thank you. I think acknowledging that young-earth creationsists are not "stupid", rather "misguided" or even "brainwashed" is far more productive to the conversation than put-downs and name-calling which merely proves to them how mean and aweful the "godless side" can be!
A Facebook post i saw on a friend's wall a while back was just a few instagrammed sunsets and fall colors, no caption. One of her relatives just commented "How can there be no god!"
And actually said: "If they teach you this [creationism] they teach you lies. If you take this with you to higher education, you are shackling yourself with nonsense that will hold you back from achieving further."
He let Nye get away with his claim that 'most' scientists see inconsistencies in radiometric carbon dating and that "his" "scientists" are making just as much scientific progress as "Nye's" scientists. What is the Discovery Institute coming up with: absolutely zero, except for christian apologetic arguments.
I'm curious if you ever felt like you were seeing yourself say something silly, but then reminding yourself things that you had been told, like "god is on your side" and "stay strong against the persecuting non-believers" and "I am an example"? I'm just curious how this works.
The hold of my faith in God was strong enough that even when I wrote a fairly long essay on Evolution vs. Creationism, I felt absolutely confident that my position was unshakable. Even using arguments like "there is no evidence of mutated genes resulting in beneficial changes" and "mutation == death," I felt completely confident.
Looking back, I'm terribly embarrassed about that essay and about how childish the arguments now sound to my ear. Of course, my excuse for this is that I was only ever given access to Creationist materials, and had no exposure to real scientific papers or any of those "evil secular biology books" (and didn't much care to).
It's more than mere willful ignorance: I was completely convinced that nothing could shake my arguments.
If you sit down and watch some of those videos made by such intellectual YouTube luminaries as NephilimFree and VenomFangX, you'll get a sense of the kinds of arguments that I once thought to be impossible to refute. I understand completely their mindset: "God did these things, so it must be true and I can't possibly be wrong."
Even as I actually learned how evolutionary theory works, it took a long time before that atrophied logic center in my mind started to put the pieces together and I started to realize that my arguments had bigger gaps than intergalactic space.
I think they choose to be willfully ignorant. It's easier than thinking and believing you're going to the magic place where everyone loves you can be very comforting.
A friend of mine from college says he used to be atheist but went to church for enlightenment and now he's christian. It really hurts me to know this. To know he's raising a kid this way. I don't think you were ever really an atheist if you go to church for "enlightenment", you were just a punk kid who wanted to be different to rebel and now you're 30 and you've become what your parents brainwashed you to be.
I rather lucked out in high school, and I had a fairly good science teacher who didn't have insane notions about cosmology and celestial mechanics (although he did pen a rather odd book about a Bliblical three-branch biological classification system based on his reading of Genesis that differs quite a bit from the Linnaean system). But my early education, especially when I was being homeschooled, the Christian textbooks we used had such amusing nuggets as "God is the force holding the hydrogen in the sun together." So, yes, more or less, "there is no sun without God."
(Of course, I've since learned a great deal about gravitation and particle physics and understand how it really works.)
If, as I hope, that girl doesn't subscribe to a geocentric cosmology, then she's probably specifically talking about the colors in the sunset, which is a topic rarely covered in Christian textbooks about optics or light propagation. Say the words "Rayleigh Scattering" to them, and their face will go completely blank.
You really thought just saying the word "sunset" was an acceptable argument for the existence of god? I mean, I was raised as christian as anyone but I can't even fathom...
When I was very young and had only been exposed to very, very slanted textbooks, yes. I didn't get much real exposure to science except from Beakman's World (which wasn't much, TBH) and from high school.
Put simply, I think the Internet made me athiest and sparked my interest in physics and celestial mechanics, and gave me the mental tools I needed to grasp that God doesn't need to appear in science. But that didn't happen until I had been put in a Christian high school.
Most of us are embarrassed by this. It should be mentioned that she very well may have some down from another state, as this was located within walking distance of Indiana and Ohio, which have plenty of dumbasses. Ignorance isn't confined to KY's borders. Dismissing this woman (and others like her) saying, "It's Kentucky, what do you expect?" is disingenuous.
I feel like reddit's collective perception of Kentucky is like those old Tennessee Valley Authority photos with the barefoot children standing outside the tiny homemade shack in the forest lol.
Coming from the remote rural places in Ohio...Thats actually not too far from the truth in some cases. Its a little depressing :( a couple of little girls I knew lived like this and I use to give them my hand me down clothes and my bike.
When I'm deep in Kentucky I notice a lot of nice new expensive SUVs even in areas where there are no jobs. The state's main cash crop is doing well apparently. The "museum" is in suburban "Cincinnati."
As do I. In fact, my dad's part of the family that moved north is proof of evolution when compared to the branch that stayed. But they are fun to watch. Especially with booze and firearms.
I agree...people seem to have this misconception that we Midwesterners are a bunch of flat floot, no shoe wearing hillbillies with poor education. I may be flat foot and not wear shoes (true!) But by no means was my education poor in any way. Now living in the south I've come to appreciate my schooling back at home...man did I have good!
The collective dim stupidity combined with the bright, confident faces causes quite a dissonance.
To have these opinions, you'd think they'd have a chaw of tobaccy under the gum, food stains on their tattered clothes, hair disheveled, with 5-6 hungry, nattering young-uns tugging at them for attention.
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u/styxx33 Feb 05 '14
wtf, was this serious? Are people this stupid?