“It is a common myth of our day, not surprisingly propagated by atheists, that religious believers are undereducated folk who have abandoned the use of reason in favor of blind faith.” Thomas D. Williams, LC
Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at Ulster University, better known for his outrageous research linking intelligence to race and sex, is quoted as saying that academics have higher IQs than the general population which explains why they tend not to believe in God. And even if they do as children, he said, they lose their faith in God as they mature and their intelligence grows.
It is a well known fact that the academic elite pride themselves on leftist irreligious views and are far more susceptible than the common folk to the lies of Leninist/Marxist ideologies.
Oddly enough, on average, serial killers also have IQs superior to those of the norm. And, well those geniuses are also more likely to go unhinged than ordinary folk. While we may have more information at our disposal than previous generations, we don’t know more about the meaning of life than previous generations. Heck, looking at the craziness around us, I’d say we know less.
The late Marxist, Christopher Hitchens, a noted critic of religion said that the concept of God or a supreme being in general was a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom. Free expression and scientific discovery, he claimed, should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. Hitchens believed that religion was responsible for most mass killings throughout history and contended that the murderous acts committed by the totalitarian regimes of communism and fascism could only be understood as the consequences of religion. In his distorted little mind, the Jacobins who slaughtered Catholics during the French Revolution and the Bolsheviks who triggered the violence that became the hallmark of the Soviet Union were really “alternative religions.”
Common sense often seems to be suffocated in the more-rarefied airs of the academy.
The Age of Atheists, by British historian Peter Watson, attempts to interpret Nietzsche’s famous 1882 declaration “God is Dead” as a turning point in intellectual history. According to Watson, Nietzsche wrote about the death of God at a time when many “thinkers” were starting to recognize a shift in Western culture related to Christianity, with the rise of “pragmatist” thinkers like Emerson, Oliver Wendell Homes and John Dewey (all Fabian Socialist) who realized that “ideas are not out there waiting to be discovered but are tools that people devise to cope with the world.”
Watson wrote hundreds of pages of intellectual goop explaining how socialists, artists, Freud, pop psychology, Beatniks, World Wars, Hippies, free love and todays Atheists have disproved the very existence of God. All of which leads, he claims, to his conclusion that religion spreads violence and intolerance. But more fundamentally, he writes, the idea of God, a unifying, singular lens for understanding everyday life has been debunked, six ways to Sundays. Or, to mix metaphors: Modern people can pick their poison for killing God. But die He must!
Watson’s intellectual snobbery assumes that because a group of a self-important, so-called insightful people thought and felt their way out of believing in God, everyone else should. If intellectual history trends toward non-belief, human history must follow.
He implies that full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism but that is not true. We know it’s not true because the vast majority of the world believes in God or at least in some sort of higher power. Only 16% of the world’s population was not affiliated with a particular faith as of 2010, although many of these people believe in God or a spiritual deity, according to the Pew Research Center. Even in the U.S. where affiliation with formal religious institutions has been declining , 86% of Millennials said they believed in God and 94% of people 34 and older said the same.
I’ve never been exceptionally impressed by the pseudo-sophistication of the intellectually elite with their pretense of moral superiority. Give me an honest, hardworking man or woman with common sense any day of the week.
Read The False Equation of Atheism and Intellectual Sophistication, at this link
