I know. I know. :smack:
Describe adherence to trivia if you would. Expand on the concept and explain why what you just said makes any sense.
Also, don’t you believe in bullshit pseudoscience?
I dunno how “complex” it is - I’m superior and that’s that.
Perhaps not. What does that have to do with my question? What “trivia” do people who don’t buy into nonsense like astrology and homeopathy thereby adhere to?
In this case, “ambient culture” = “reality.”
You based your view of your own intelligence on your dismissal of X, Y, and Z trivia. 
No, I believe in the efficacy of arts that I’ve experienced empirically.
Biffy I guess you’d need to be as smart as me to understand the point I was making. In short, not believing in those things doesn’t tell you whether or not you are smart, just whether or not you are able to conform to the opinions of those around you. Just because you believe homeopathy is bullshit doesn’t mean you understand why it is bullshit. It just means that you parroted the words of people smarter than you.
What is this, the Sarah Palin school of debate?
If disdain for religion were about conforming to ambient culture there would be no atheists in the bible belt.
Someone who can’t understand that there is no evidence for God, Chi or Homeopathic woo isn’t exactly making a great case for his intellectual prowess. But in any case, I didn’t say I thought they were stupid, I said I thought they, regardless of intellect were damaged in some way where irrationality became a comfort. That’s not to say that a genuinely stupid person might believe in something stupid without thinking it through of course. 
But plenty of smart people believe, I presume because it feels good.
That’s a reasonable (if partial) definition of intelligence.
So you would judge someone dispassionately if they, as an adult thought Santa Claus was real?
Believing in childish fantasies doesn’t make someone stupid, but it certainly is a sign that they are willing to put desire ahead of fact.
Dan, So your non-belief in God makes you more intelligent than Einstein, Darwin and Galileo?..wow!
Funny thing is, none of these guys needed God to accomplish what they did.
Einstein’s beliefs are somewhat complicated, but certainly what he believed would make most people who profess a belief in god uncomfortable. It’s sad that Galileo and Darwin had to struggle to reconcile their work with religion. Think how much more they could have accomplished without that burden. In a better intellectual climate Darwin could have published years earlier and benefited from more peer interaction.
That was an impressive sidestep! What you ae failing to confront in your statement is that Darwin HIMSELF was a believer in God.
I would have to call bullshit if you professed to be more intelligent.
What’s the metric to use to evaluate superiority? Intelligence? It seems that’s what most people jump to, but I’m not sure why being more intelligent would make somebody superior to somebody else. Perhaps better at logic puzzles and things like that, but then, being taller means you’re better at cleaning the dust off the fridge and getting things from high shelves, so why doesn’t that entail superiority? Besides, I’m not sure that having a high IQ means that you’re smart any more than being tall means you’re a good basketball player.
Actually, I don’t think there is any meaning to ‘being superior’ on its own – the sentence ‘I’m superior to you’ only acquires substance when it’s specified at what I’m supposedly superior. I might be superior to you at tennis (which would make you one of the worst tennis players in the world), but that doesn’t make me superior in any other way. So, if you think you’re superior to somebody else, you probably aren’t.
The one where you don’t even respond to the arguments you simply heckle? Yeah, I think that is the Sarah Palin school of debate.
Not necessarily. I don’t take this ‘atheists are immune to group dynamics’ argument y’all like to peddle.
Making a case for intellectual prowess? Again, your criteria are the right antipathies to particular keywords. This of course has nothing to do with intelligence.
Glad we agree on that part.
No, I might think they were dumb, but that wouldn’t make me think I was smart for not believing in Santa Claus.
Agreed.
I belong to a message board wherein (see that “wherein”? pretty classy, huh?..) the merits of an *Atlantic *book review are fiercely debated.
It’s not an impressive side-step. He showed no intellectual prowess whatsoever, he merely repeated the trope that he keeps in his belt for such occasions. It’s a standard rebuttal. He doesn’t need to be intelligent at all, he just needs to be able to repeat the right key phrases of his particular caste.
But he wasn’t a believer in God because he was intelligent. He was a believer in God because he was brought up in a society where the alternative was unlikely.
And he achieved all he did *despite *being bogged down by superstitious hookum. As I said, smart people believe, but they certainly don’t do it because they are smart. Smart people do irrational things all the time, like smoke, cheat on their wives or hate minorities. They do them for emotional reasons, not intellectual ones.
Precisely.
I’m prepared to say that Darwin without God would very likely have been more intelligent than Darwin with God, to the degree I can plausibly speculate about a guy who’s been dead for over 125 years.
He loves his counterfactuals.
I think I am smarter than those who need for history to be different in order to validate their points of view. ;p
Who is to say that without the overarching belief in God, he ever would have been taught to read, as in Darwin’s culture literacy was a project of the church over the course of centuries. Maybe there is a Pushtun Darwin who will never be known for his genius because literacy is not valued in his society.
Since I asked you twice to defend your use of the word “trivia,” and you sidestepped the issue both times, I see no value in continuing to engage you on the matter.