Do Atheists really consider Christians less intelligent?

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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.

I deleted my post because you already corrected yourself earlier. Too late I gues.

I'm not sure that I sweat that question particularly much. When searching for truth people compare, contrast, and test models. It's part of how we got to where we are today with respect to technology and innovation. You see the gnarliness of competing philosophies right now with respect to all the different mathematically correct interpretations of quantum mechanics as well as different routes to try and recalibrate the concepts of matter and consciousness in relationship to the 'hard problem'.

As for the neoplatonism, hermeticism, and gnosticism of the time I don't know if you'll have the time to listen to this whole lecture, you don't have to listen to it at all if you don't want to but its fair to say that at least two of the three had some pretty advanced humanistic concepts woven into their spirituality, of the likes that wouldn't appear again until the renaissance. In that respect at least neoplatonism and hermeticism were both quite forward thinking as compared to either the European church militant or Arabian jurisprudence.

I feel kind of ambilivant about Muslims since I know one Muslim who's a really nice guy yet I know the fundie Muslims are jerks. I'm not saying this one nice guy proves they're all good or one jerk proves they're all bad or anything. I know the Quran says to do some really bad things in it. I guess the nice guy Muslims are the ones who are able to ignore that stuff. Just like how the Bible says to do some really bad things yet some Christians are able to ignore that stuff and live normal lives.

Most people are still people first and foremost unless they get parasitized enough by an idea to become walking avatars of that idea. Most muslims you will meet are decent people because they still have at least one foot planted in the world they live in.

I find myself saying these kinds of things, all the time, that there is no personality conflict, (such-and-such-faith) is likable or has high culture.

But. everything that makes most ideologues seem human or humane, is dedicated to just their own worldview -- not to you. Just because they are happy, or look good, or treat their fellows well, does not mean that you will benefit in any way. They may have different standards of treatment for outsiders. They may be prejudiced, and you can be their target of arbitrary prejudices.

We are forever hearing of the vast, right-wing conspiracy, but atheists and foreigners are not above playing politics.