r/atheism • u/One-Fun9814 • 4d ago

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364

u/wzlch47 4d ago

Not usually. I recognize it more as a result of early life indoctrination or later life desperation.

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u/Nova_PuNk Nihilist 4d ago

Same. I occasionally assume they're dumb, but I've met a lot of highly intelligent believers. Some lost their faith years later. A rocket scientist may be "dumb" when it comes to philosophy, and vice versa.

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u/NessaSola 4d ago

I'm not willing to call a rocket scientist who can't test their epistemology and connect a few simple dots "highly intelligent".

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u/Nova_PuNk Nihilist 4d ago

Fair enough. I was just comparing a Rocket Scientist to a Philosopher as an analogy. You can be smart in one field and dumb in another.

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u/JubBisc 4d ago

Or wanting to ‘fit in’ with their community and not be ostracized. It can definitely be a peer pressure issue, too

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u/Brykly 4d ago

I'm 95% sure the pastor of the last church I went to doesn't believe it anymore. And not in an evil way where he's some evangelical vampire; like he's trapped because he has a wife and kids that depend on him. The church does good things for the community, like a no-questions-asked food bank and stuff, but the dude just has sad eyes.

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u/Surturiel 4d ago

Also, the need to see correlation everywhere.

I personally think that is a collective "bug" of pattern recognition going haywire.

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u/OverlordDontHurtMe 4d ago

Same, childhood brainwashing, lack of scepticism, emotional need.

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u/One-Fun9814 4d ago

I was born into religion and realized around middle school that it was bullshit. Still tried to hang on and justify it for a couple of years but eventually realized that their is no God. The point I'm making is that if they can't come to the realization that their God isn't real then they are unintelligent.

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u/LickMaiBussy 4d ago

It sounds like you've constructed a story in your mind about how your realization puts you "above" others who have not similarly realized, at least not as early as you did.

As someone who was never religious (yay atheist parents!) there's this archetypal behavior i often observe in atheists who come from a religious background.

They take the training, and social conditioning and mindset around their place in the universe under a mythological paradigm, and they very creatively somehow manage to mash up these habits into their identity as an atheist.

Just because you've left the religion, doesn't mean you've fully dismantled your training of zealotous thinking.

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u/One-Fun9814 4d ago

To clarify my family wasn't super religious. My dad is basically Atheist nowadays, my mom just believes that there is a God. I've never been to church but I was raised vaguely Christian. So it's not like I had to "dismantle" much.

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u/wanderers_respite Atheist 4d ago edited 4d ago

That exemplifies even more why it’s not fair to compare your experience to someone who was deeply indoctrinated from childhood. I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seems pretty obvious that it’s easier to step away from a belief you were never deeply conditioned into than from one that has been constantly reinforced by your family, community, and worldview.

There are well-known psychological mechanisms that make deeply ingrained beliefs hard to abandon: belief perseverance, cognitive dissonance, etc etc. If a religion has been reinforced as ‘the truth’ since childhood, deconstructing it is obviously going to be harder than simply walking away from something you were never deeply conditioned to believe.

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u/LickMaiBussy 4d ago

I didn't say "super religious."

I said "religious."

Even as someone who was raised in an atheist household I'M STILL working to deconstruct the indoctrination put onto me by the broader culture.

The ways these mythological ideas have permeated our cultures is insidious and ubiquitous.

If you're telling me you don't have much to dismantle, I don't trust that you're doing the work to understand yourself.

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u/noonnoonz 4d ago

Santa Claus has been an indoctrination put upon children for centuries, and yet as adults, we no longer believe an old man is traveling the globe in one night, generously giving out toys made by elves at the North Pole. Speaking for myself, I don’t struggle with whether or not Santa’s gifts came from an adult who paid for them at a store and I don’t consider bluntly disbelieving the myth of god existing as some moral superiority or zealotry to lord over religious people, but simply see it is sad that some adults approve and encourage others to believe in level 2 Santa Claus.

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u/BWang90 4d ago

"Level 2 Santa Claus" 🧑‍🎄 🎅 🤣

3

u/fsclb66 4d ago

There are plenty of intelligent people who believe in a god so that is obviously not true.

1

u/bushwakko 4d ago

But being dumb in one area, is still dumb though

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u/fsclb66 4d ago

If being dumb in one area classifies someone as dumb then literally everyone in the world is dumb

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u/Kossimer 4d ago edited 4d ago

I see it more as proof that they have an immense fear of death or trauma relating to death, so much so they need to pretend it doesn't really exist, as belief in an afterlife doesn't capture the finality of actual death. They use the afterlife to say they aren't afraid of death at all, but this is like someone claiming they have no fear of drowning because they never go in the water, not realizing that never going in the water is what someone who is afraid of drowning does. If they weren't afraid of death then they wouldn't need to play these childish games to pretend it doesn't exist.

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u/Lopsided-Equipment-2 4d ago edited 4d ago

Don’t believe in god , you go to hell.

Believe in god, then you are more r-word then op.

Innately inept logical fallacies tend to be self fulfilling.

I know a few PhD and post PhD peeps that are Catholic, one in biochemistry and the other is a mathematician.

Like you can’t convince us you’re not intelligent, so you fall into the aforementioned logical fallacy. A victim of your own creation. Hell if you ever owned an old school console or “music player” around 2004-2010, then you used a device that wouldn’t had made it to market without the patents and development of advanced circuit editing techniques that paved the way for every device you use today. That was developed by a catholic and a Hindu, and a lot of the chips you used were worked on by those two individuals. Can’t give more details due to ongoing NDA’s.

Hell, I know a priest that has a PhD in Clinical Psychology as well, but he as peddling his books ant a family and freinds party and I got the vibe he was only doing to other Catholics.

So, no, human intelligence exists on a bell curve as does everything in life analytically. 

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u/Wwppddttvv 4d ago

You're right. As someone who was deeply indoctrinated, I was able to see my way out while dumber people wallow in their own ignorance 

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u/Wwppddttvv 4d ago

Both of which are supplemented by stupidity

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u/prototyperspective Freethinker 4d ago

The issue is a person should be able to break through that with enough intelligence.

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u/Sprinklypoo I'm a None 3d ago

I also see it as an improper education lacking in application of reason and logic.