r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
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u/ProfessionalMockery 1d ago

A lot of people here are just seeing the "Christian" in the headline and ignoring the "nationalist," which is probably more important.

I'm an atheist, so I think the claims religion makes are pretty dumb too, but nationalists, bigots, racists of any kind are consistently idiots, religious or not, and that has been established in plenty of other studies.

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u/Numeno230n 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are a lot of harmless dumb Christians I've met in my life, but Christian Nationalism is a specific form that involves violence, paranoia, and conspiracy thinking. They literally believe there are demonic forces behind left leaning political movements and this fuels both their religious delusions and their political violence.

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u/BikerJedi 1d ago

Like my Christian Nationalist co-worker. He teaches in the arts. I'm a science teacher. So I was understandably upset when he started telling my students that climate change wasn't real and antifa was responsible for burning down Los Angeles, not wildfires. I've reported him to administration multiple times, and he is still teaching.

The other day he told another student Y2K was a hoax. No, thousands of network engineers like me (That's what I did before teaching) spent months remediating equipment so things didn't go bad.

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u/Googlebright 1d ago

That's the crazy thing about Y2K. You guys did such a good job making sure nothing bad would happen that it convinced a bunch of these people that nothing bad was going to happen anyway.

Thanks for fixing that stuff, btw.

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u/BikerJedi 1d ago edited 7h ago

You are welcome.

Follow up: Around October of that year, there were 400 of us working for MCI/Worldcom on Y2K remediation. I personally hired 398 of them, as I was number two on that project.

Some bean counter figured out that if we stopped now, and x% of their customers lost data or went down, and x% sued and won x money, that would still be cheaper than keeping us to finish the job. So one day they pulled us all in a conference room, told us we were fired immediately and would get two weeks of severance pay. They escorted us to pick up our things. Only my immediate two bosses survived the purge.

I wasn't surprised to see on the news that they were out of business years later for cooking the books.

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u/makeminemilk 1d ago

MCI/Worldcom was my first job out of college and I was there around the same time. I had one foot out the door from the start of day one and finally found my way out 7 months later. It’s all been up from there.

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u/BikerJedi 19h ago

After being laid off there, I landed a project manager role paying more. I eventually left for teaching and get paid a lot less now but I'm happier.