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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 08/09/2009 : 01:40:37 [Permalink]
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Dave is correct, I think. It's the curse of sapience in that we cannot imagine an existence that does not include the unique and irreplaceable "Me." Thus the various reincarnation and afterlife myths; the Happy Hunting Grounds amongst the stars, and so forth. Organized religions of all strips cynically take advantage of this and give us such things as lunatics wearing vests of composition explosive lining up for the 72 virgin scam. And we also get Wendy Wright, she of the trachea I briefly fantasized about crushing. The problem we face is that they refuse to keep their unsupported and therefore clap-trap, to themselves, but, like Ms. Wright, must spread it around like fever during the tick season by fair means of foul. Their religious dogmas require that they do so.
I don't think that they are necessarily stupid, although our Wendy made a pretty good case for it, but need something to lean on; some reassurance that that they will always "Be."
My take on it.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 08/09/2009 : 04:06:03 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by filthy
I don't think that they are necessarily stupid, although our Wendy made a pretty good case for it, but need something to lean on; some reassurance that that they will always "Be." |
I don't think Wright is just stupid. I think that mainly, she's crazy, infected with the psychotic religious meme. Like many fundamentalists, she's literally of two minds. For the most part, she consciously believes in Creationism, while semi-consciously she recognizes its insupportable falsehood. It's a form cognitive dissonance or of Orwellian Doublethink, that allows one to lie while believing the lie, all the while knowing it's a lie. If that isn't madness, I don't know what is. And it's a type of madness that's custom-designed to replicate itself like a virus to others.
This also involves a self-rewarding feedback for the fundamentalist. One is able to avoid hard thinking by simply accepting mystical, nonsense explanations. Fundamentalists, and religionists in general, are at the core, lazy people who hate hard-thinking people. Such people effectively use their brains to limit their own intellect.
Doublethink rewards the intellectually lazy.
Wright is a legend in her own mind as she puts herself fully on an equal footing with Dr. Dawkins, despite her lack of biological training or knowledge. She even seems to think her willful ignorance -- and self-inflicted stupidity -- are advantageous. Her conversation consists purely of spouting a script of memorized talking point, each talking point triggered as an automatic subroutine by comments from Dawkins.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 08/09/2009 04:12:41 |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/09/2009 : 14:34:45 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Dude.....
| Must have keeled over and hit the enter key with his face....? |
As August inexorably leads to September, a familiar tune involving temporal succession emerges - forcing consideration of the real value of all one really has --- time. So obviously, I'm not going to waste precious minutes composing a wordy and pompous two-paragraph riposte to your snarky commentary. I'm far above all that!
Suffice to say, I'm delighted to have had the opportunity, albeit inadvertent, to service you; and I can only hope that you will be able to return the favor sometime in the near future and eat me!
Bill
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I should have copied your post before you edited it! I was commenting on the abrupt mid-sentence ending, not on the content of your now completed essay.
Surely you can forgive me for being concerned that a person of your august years may have come to an abrupt end while posting here.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/09/2009 : 14:43:01 [Permalink]
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bngbuck said:
Are religious folks, specifically the followers, not necessarily the leaders, just plain dumb? Can their acceptance of superstition and irrationality be largely attributed to lack of education, ignorance, emotional dominance of the ratiocination process, mental illness or the like; and it be wrong to conclude that a simple lack of sufficient intelligence primarily explains their frequently absurd statements and actions?
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I suspect it has more to do with training and conditioning. These people have been told their entire lives that education is not to be valued, that the bible is "true", that you must accept the claims of authority figures in your community (in this case their church/temple/whatever) without question, and they have been drilled at least once a week since childhood with bible study.
Holding fast to a strong belief is not a quality unique to stupid people.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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R.Wreck
SFN Regular
USA
1191 Posts |
Posted - 08/09/2009 : 17:57:59 [Permalink]
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While Wendy here seems to be one of the dimmer bulbs you'll have the misfortune to encounter, on the whole I have to agree with Mooner. I think crazy better describes your "hardcore" creationist / evolution denier / religious whack job. Many people who have a hard time dealing with reality turn out to be intelligent (e.g. Collins). The really annoying ones (like Wendy) are those that combine the crazy with mind numbing levels of stupidity. |
The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibliities of knowledge.
T. H. Huxley
The Cattle Prod of Enlightened Compassion
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 08/09/2009 : 19:38:03 [Permalink]
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Dude......
Alexander Pope would have it that forgiveness is divine. As I have never doubted my own divinity, egotheist that I am, you are hereby forgiven, my son. Now pull your incisors out of my butt and go ponder the fact that I was pulling your leg hard while you still had a firm hold on my shoe -- I do hope you caught the smarmy sarcasm of my two paragraph reply to your dollar store shot; and, yes, abruptly pitching forward onto the keyboard is a distinct possibility some days, and I appreciate you calling it to my attention.
Truth is, I've been performing in a considerably different arena recently, I had forgotten some of the arcane details of the Shitz Forums software layout and I hit "POST" instead of "PREVIEW". I should have wiped my ass right then, but I lazily let it all hang out until I rewrote the whole post. Your eagle eye probably would have found it even if I had gotten it off the page in a few microseconds.
Anyway, after this fuck-up, I promise to wait at least an hour or two before calling you out on future outrageous spelling/punctuation errors. I've got to keep you stirred up, you're a helluva lot more fun that way! |
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the_ignored
SFN Addict
2562 Posts |
Posted - 08/10/2009 : 10:55:36 [Permalink]
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| I should have wiped my ass right then, but I lazily let it all hang out until I rewrote the whole post. Your eagle eye probably would have found it even if I had gotten it off the page in a few microseconds. |
And thank you for that wonderful, wonderful image! PHPHPHPH
And on that note, I'm off to lunch.
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>From: enuffenuff@fastmail.fm
(excerpt follows):
> I'm looking to teach these two bastards a lesson they'll never forget.
> Personal visit by mates of mine. No violence, just a wee little chat.
>
> **** has also committed more crimes than you can count with his
> incitement of hatred against a religion. That law came in about 2007
> much to ****'s ignorance. That is fact and his writing will become well
> know as well as him becoming a publicly known icon of hatred.
>
> Good luck with that fuckwit. And Reynold, fucking run, and don't stop.
> Disappear would be best as it was you who dared to attack me on my
> illness knowing nothing of the cause. You disgust me and you are top of
> the list boy. Again, no violence. Just regular reminders of who's there
> and visits to see you are behaving. Nothing scary in reality. But I'd
> still disappear if I was you.
What brought that on? this. Original posting here.
Another example of this guy's lunacy here. |
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 08/10/2009 : 11:39:05 [Permalink]
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The Ignored.....
And thank you for that wonderful, wonderful image! PHPHPHPH
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I'll ignore that! |
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the_ignored
SFN Addict
2562 Posts |
Posted - 08/10/2009 : 13:24:19 [Permalink]
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| I should have wiped my ass right then, but I lazily let it all hang out until I rewrote the whole post. Your eagle eye probably would have found it even if I had gotten it off the page in a few microseconds. |
And thank you for that wonderful, wonderful image! PHPHPHPH
And on that note, I'm off to lunch.
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>From: enuffenuff@fastmail.fm
(excerpt follows):
> I'm looking to teach these two bastards a lesson they'll never forget.
> Personal visit by mates of mine. No violence, just a wee little chat.
>
> **** has also committed more crimes than you can count with his
> incitement of hatred against a religion. That law came in about 2007
> much to ****'s ignorance. That is fact and his writing will become well
> know as well as him becoming a publicly known icon of hatred.
>
> Good luck with that fuckwit. And Reynold, fucking run, and don't stop.
> Disappear would be best as it was you who dared to attack me on my
> illness knowing nothing of the cause. You disgust me and you are top of
> the list boy. Again, no violence. Just regular reminders of who's there
> and visits to see you are behaving. Nothing scary in reality. But I'd
> still disappear if I was you.
What brought that on? this. Original posting here.
Another example of this guy's lunacy here. |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/10/2009 : 13:26:24 [Permalink]
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bngbuck said:
Alexander Pope would have it that forgiveness is divine. As I have never doubted my own divinity, egotheist that I am, you are hereby forgiven, my son. Now pull your incisors out of my butt and go ponder the fact that I was pulling your leg hard while you still had a firm hold on my shoe -- I do hope you caught the smarmy sarcasm of my two paragraph reply to your dollar store shot; and, yes, abruptly pitching forward onto the keyboard is a distinct possibility some days, and I appreciate you calling it to my attention.
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I can't just be concerned for the potentially frail health of a senior citizen? Sarcasm aside..... err, wait, I don't think I can put sarcasm aside, and I am certainly capable of detecting it!
| Anyway, after this fuck-up, I promise to wait at least an hour or two before calling you out on future outrageous spelling/punctuation errors. I've got to keep you stirred up, you're a helluva lot more fun that way! |
Ohh, no worries there. This is conversational writing, and very often even the best of us let small technical errors slip in, or we choose to ignore Strunk&White and just go with a more stream of consciousness style.
Besides, if I recall correctly (and I usually do), you may have fallen victim to a particularly humorous bit of irony here in the past... correcting grammar/spelling and then immediately making a glaring error yourself!
Best to just overlook most of those errors on an internet forum, except where the error seriously confuses communication.
So, back to the topic... Do you really think the majority of religious people with these very factually wrong beliefs are stupid? Or, perhaps (as I suggest in my last post), it is a matter of conditioning/training?
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 08/10/2009 : 23:25:37 [Permalink]
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Well, let's review:
Dave feels that fear and uncertainty are the driving forces behind religious irrationality, intelligence is innate and rationality is learned.
Filthy focuses on specifically the fear and uncertainty surrounding what follows(?) death.
Mooner not only thinks that religious crazies are stupid, he thinks they are crazy too. As you may be able to deduce, I tend to agree! Crazies are crazy!
Dude cites training and conditioning as the dominant factors in explaining these nut cases' erratic behavior and verbal outpourings.
To what degree intelligence is innate or to what degree experience and education may modify that native intelligence that may be inborn, is still hotly debated among behavioral and cognitive psychologists. But irrespective of the nature/nurture ratio, there is little question as to fact that there are varying degrees of this elusive-to-define quality in any large universe of humans. In fact, many studies have shown that in a sufficiently large population, intelligence distributes in a typical bell curve pattern.
At this point I do not have much information on what the frequency distribution of religiosity may be, in fact I don't know if there have even been any formal studies of any nature of those professing strong religious beliefs. So probably, anyone's educated guess is about as good as the next regarding the degree of correlation between intelligence and strong religious beliefs. If anyone here knows of any experimental investigations relating to these matters, I would be glad to hear of them.
It appears to me that early conditioning and indoctrination very likely must have a strong and lasting effect on those with meager to average intellectual endowment. As that quality rises in those comprising the right half of the bell curve, I strongly suspect that these folks native and acquired intelligence allows them to significantly overcome the effects of early conditioning as their mind matures. As I previously stated, I cannot as this time support this conjecture with experimental verification. I think it would be an excellent premise on which to base such a study.
But Mooner's suggestion that these religious folks are not just dumb, but also crazy, is really worth some consideration. What is crazy? Various adjectives appear in the dictionary; insane, unsound, devoid of common sense, and many more; most pretty close to what we all see in religious zealots.
Is there a correlation between stupid and crazy? Maybe, particularly with this particular type of irrational belief and behavior. Again, I don'r presume that correlation exists across the board with all kinds of irrationality. But it just seems intuitively comfortable to link a certain degree of craziness with a significant degree of stupidity (and ignorance) to accurately characterize these folks like Ms. Wright and, particularly, her followers!
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/10/2009 : 23:49:45 [Permalink]
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It is very difficult to quantify intelligence. Clearly Ms Wright can memorize information and repeat it back in response to certain simuli. Does that make her smart enough to memorize a long list or dumb enough to not be aware her "facts" are completely wrong?
While she obviously isn't going to dazzle anyone with intellect she doesn't have an intelligence to far below the average.
If she just had a different (and correct) set of facts memorized she wouldn't appear quite so stupid at all I think.
But those facts are readily available to her if she chose to look them up. I'd wager that she is probably quite well versed with some factually accurate information. She has to at least recognize it in order to respond.
While intellect may play a role (it probably does), social, cultural, and other training/conditioning do as well.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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astropin
SFN Regular
USA
970 Posts |
Posted - 08/11/2009 : 09:58:28 [Permalink]
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Well we do know that there is a direct correlation between religious beliefs and level of education. As education goes up religious beliefs go down. So, is there a direct correlation between level of education & intelligence? I would think so.
Dude; Wendy's repeating of information that's been pounded into her is not much of a sign of intelligence. She could very well be below average and manage that trick. The fact that she is completely unwilling to seek her own answers is telling as well.
While I agree that had she memorized correct facts she would "appear" more intelligent. Appear being the operative word.
There is a HUGE difference between spouting off facts and truly understanding what it is you are saying. Wendy does not even appear to fully comprehend the crap she is pushing. |
I would rather face a cold reality than delude myself with comforting fantasies.
You are free to believe what you want to believe and I am free to ridicule you for it.
Atheism:
The result of an unbiased and rational search for the truth.
Infinitus est numerus stultorum |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 08/11/2009 : 11:48:24 [Permalink]
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I don't think she's crazy at all. I think she's goal-driven to the point that she'll turn any stone, climb any mountain, tell any lie to acheive that goal. I think the Dawkins discussion was another tool to get her blather out in public again. This should come as no surprise because our politics and corporate affairs and churchs are full of this mindset. She's not insane, just dedicated, and again, why Dawkins gave her the forum is beyond even the ken of the gods.
"Insane" is a tag that must be used with some consideration. Hell, I've been called crazy just for picking up rattlesnakes. Go figger! 
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/11/2009 : 13:19:53 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by astropin
Well we do know that there is a direct correlation between religious beliefs and level of education. As education goes up religious beliefs go down. So, is there a direct correlation between level of education & intelligence? I would think so.
Dude; Wendy's repeating of information that's been pounded into her is not much of a sign of intelligence. She could very well be below average and manage that trick. The fact that she is completely unwilling to seek her own answers is telling as well.
While I agree that had she memorized correct facts she would "appear" more intelligent. Appear being the operative word.
There is a HUGE difference between spouting off facts and truly understanding what it is you are saying. Wendy does not even appear to fully comprehend the crap she is pushing.
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Since intelligence is a difficult concept to even define, say nothing of measure, we are stuck using the same old subjective determinations of intellect: grades, degree/credentials, vocabulary, memory, proper usage, communication skills, and so on.
Is there some reason beyond the fact that she is totally wrong that we find her to be stupid? It is not so difficult to picture her shooting off accurate data instead of her creationist nonsense is it?
I'm just saying that I find the whole training/conditioning explanation more plausible than saying creationist are just fucking stupid. Blaming their beliefs on native intelligence, or lack of, also leaves us with no recourse. There is no cure for stupid.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Richard Dawkins interviews Wendy Wright
