Do Atheists really consider Christians less intelligent?

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Have you noticed a lot of the most outspoken mainstream atheists these days are strongly opposed to the regressive left and their attempts to shout-down free speech and ram-rod through word policing legislation?

Even some of the atheists opposed to the regressive left are themselves left wing. They believe the left is something worth preserving which is why they want to remove the regressive cancer from the left.

I have two things that I find really strong agreement with them on:
1) Freedom of speech needs to win for the sake of the best ideas overcoming the bad.
2) We want to move forward with our culture in the most clear-thinking manner possible. Our technology greatly raises the stakes regarding the degree of harm that logical errors, moral errors, and errors of uninformed good intent can create.

Charles Darwin was a Christian then Agnostic, never been an atheist, him being an atheist is a myth that is both promoted by the Church and atheists.

The problem with making sweeping statements like this, including referring to "atheism" as if it described a collective, is that you're now going to have to go into detail to describe exactly what you mean by "atheism" in such a context. If you're referring to the practice of "Scientism", then I don't consider such people to be genuine atheists on the grounds that they have a dogmatic faith in a higher authority.



Appropriate the holiday, or join in with a traditional celebration of the prevailing culture they live within rather than pointlessly railing against it on ideological grounds?



There's only one kind of atheist: one who does not believe in a god or gods. Every other additional ideological position may be partially informed by their atheism but is not a condition of it. If you've met one atheist...



Some of them are only just waking up to the realisation that Progressivism is a quasi-religion with dogma and doctrine - something many of us have been saying for years. It comes with an ever-expanding mythos as more and more sub-groups are added to the stack and as "theories" from the soft sciences are uncritically accepted into the faith.



Not sure why anyone would care either way, religion is an accident of birth.

As a point of order, however, "agnostic" and "atheist" are not mutually exclusive (likewise "agnostic" and "theist"), and one cannot exist in a quantum state of belief.

Yes and no.

It is not enough for liberals to be heard, in a free marketplace of ideas; they have to stifle others. They don't want equality, they want animal dominance.

Except on the farthest right fringe of Dominionism, mainstream conservatives have been driven into the margins, into the closet, and are making enfeebled, desperate appeals to higher reason.

I think that leftism has won, hands down, but history is a pendulum. They've taken the bit too far. They have pushed the envelope out of bounds, as bullying, prods, and nudges only succeed within the rules of normative behavior.

I think the pushback has come from the alt-right. You have gender, racial, and religious minorities representing conservatism, now, causing even more riots.

Are Milo and Anne Coulter examples of moderate liberalism or conservatism.

The DaVinci Code movie, ossuary, Shroud of Turin, Bible Code stuff etc, tend to be highly-publicized on Easter and Christmas then debunked, as though questionable, modern genealogies invalidate the Bible. I see, not cheesy, but Satanic, horror movie marathons, and laws are passed in secret. So, rather than allowing people to have their humble observances, in peace, you have the Great Debate. Sometimes, it wouldn't bother me, if there were Blue Laws, against this kind of thing; if you believe the Bible, literally, this is against the spirit of the Sabbath, and the land itself will rebel, until it can have it's rest. A very-pious person would tell you that it causes natural upheaval.

I have to guess there's something in the content of what you're saying that I'm tone-deaf to.

Are you speaking specifically in terms of social conservatism? That's the only thing I can think of that's being dismantled as revelation-based morality rather than information from practical experience and research and I'd think of that specifically in terms of gay rights, individual liberties, etc.. The area that really hasn't changed, at least on the John Stewart Mill liberal side, is that personal responsibility is personal responsibility and an understanding that rights without responsibilities come with an undesired atrophy. You could think of that group perhaps as economically and governmentally conservative but socially liberal.

As far as freedom of conscience I do think that's been overstepped. If a doctor for instance is of a religion that believes abortion is sinful or murderous that doctor should never be forced to perform one the way a Muslim or Jew should never be forced to drink wine or eat pork.

Regarding the most expedient or tried-and-tested ideas willing in the sphere of debate - if that is what happens (it seems like it would still be largely broken but still better than any of our other alternatives) - I don't see anything wrong with that. If it turns out that the old church doctrines end up largely gone and what you have are groups of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics with a bunch of unaffiliated quantum consciousness people between them I don't see that as an earth-shatteringly bad outcome.

I'm trying to think of what else is being taken from people if the social liberarian liberals win the debate on the strength of their arguments and I'm drawing a blank. To even talk about naivity in child rearing they seem to be showing less and less of that even and at most the hold-out of naivity in some areas (also fading) is naivity to the notion that social institutions are a really helpful thing for people or that people need a strong and vibrant social mythos to identify their lives, their activiity, posssibly their nation, etc.. with. The more people are talking about that the more you find center and center-left thinkers who are catching on with that and it's gone from some weird occulted status where I'm the only person on WP talking about it to all kinds of people passing around videos on these topics from Youtube.



Again, I'd need to know what thing of value they're trying to save from extinction or why it would be in a category of needing to be saved but logically indefensible. If it's belief in consciousness beyond neurons I think they can rest easy - I don't think the science will look anything like it does now in even ten or twenty years and of the people who everyone loves to call 'woo-woo' peddlers you're going to see at least a few of them setting the mainstream tenor because as far as the evidence is playing itself out we're at a minimum in a neutral monist position, at a maximum in a virtual reality made of consciousness, and neither of those are the accidental, meaningless quagmires of nihilism that's gone as the recommended drink with materialism.


What they've exposed is that nuttery, anti-intellectualism, and all kinds of sloppy utopian thinking know no side of the political spectrum any more than the other. There are plenty of reasons to at least be a fiscal and governmental conservative, plenty of reasons to be cautiously optimistic about liberalism to the extent that a society that's ready to take on more freedoms can have the doors opened just a little bit more, stabilized, etc.. and it's a dance between both impulses - ie. too much too fast is destructive, too little motion forward is destructive.


Do you have any familiarity with Mark Blyth? He's been saying this, I heard John Michael Greer on many occasions and stating it particularly well on a panel discussion out in Lancaster, PA via Youtube - the working class is being squeezed, their ability to financially take care of themselves is being stretched to the breaking point, under a neoliberal economic plan that's now contracting rather than operating under the myth of eternal growth. The working class are being rolled under to keep the salary class (ie. white collar managerial and technical) in the same lifestyle. They're of all races because the people in the working class are of all races. This doesn't mean capitalism itself is terrible, it's the only viable thing we've had and it still looks that way, just that the economic pendulum is going to need to shift otherwise we'll have crisis after crisis, continually rising unemployment, and the only answer to make the world worth living in for the wealthy is making concessions so that the working class and everyone else has enough income to buy products to keep the whole thing going. For that last part I like the way Mark Blyth puts it - the Hampton's aren't a defensible position.


Milo's a provocateur and he's whatever the people who've annoyed him lately hate. Ann Coulter's typically been center-right with some strong words and snip/sarcasm in defense of the right, not unlike Laura Ingraham.

The concept of evolution, as from a singularity to higher lifeforms, from savages to gods, was first proposed by Greco Roman philosophers and mystery schools, who most certainly did not ascertain it, from radioistopes, geology, and the relative depth of fossils.

From his Hellenistic bias, Darwin was getting you to argue between materialism and Christianity, as though his own, third, completely-separate, religious view was the impartial, absolute truth.

Coulter has posed nude and married a black person.

According to Dr. James David Manning, black people considered interracial relationships to be disreputable, on the grounds that a promiscuous, white woman would have lowered her standards, as per the cultural mores.

I found her reasoning flawless, in terms of fiscal conservatism, but she is not a cultural conservative, a woman discussing social issues, out of the home.


The reason why I have written it, this way, is you have an empowered, successful woman, in an interracial marriage, liberated sexually, and not even this is enough, to keep liberals from burning the place down.

How is a gay Jew, who says he likes black men, and wears an 18th century wig, on stage, supposed to be so arch-conservative, so nazi, as to be intolerable.

In regards to evolution, the percentage of Evangelicals who outright reject it is only 10-15%, lower among mainline Protestants and Catholics.

I am an agnostic, but no. I think the average IQ of atheists/agnostics/humanitarians/etc is higher than that of the Christians because there is statistically a higher percentage of highly educated people in the non-theists group, and highly educated people tend to have high IQs. But I would not make an assumption on another person's intellect just because of their religion affiliation.

Yes. It's ironic that both atheists, and fundies paint him as an apostle of atheism when he was never atheist.

Fundies imply that he was out to attack religion. He wasnt. He just came to the conclusion one day that evolution through natural selection explained the origin of species (god is niether here nor there to the question). And that caused the cultural firestorm that hasnt stopped yet.

Really?

I thought that there were surveys that showed that over half of the American population believed that the world was created "in its present form less than then thousand years ago".

Only when they claim that Satan placed all those dinosaur bones on earth to fool people.

This was, actually, a very clever point, imo.

Most Christians are not doctrinaire. They are called Sunday Christians, as in, only on Sunday. Or, nominal Christians, as in name only. They say they are born Christian, as though it is a culture, and not a discipline.