I’m sure lots of us have tween friends on facebook.
Not me, mind you. But I’m sure you have a lot in common. You into Pokemon?
Like most of us, I think he’ll get it sooner or later. And more than one.
Where exactly in mine did I say that you did? :rolleyes:
The “challenge” he faces is that of being a sexual-harassing little prick. Whether that’s from being an Aspie, or from his frustration brought on by his terminal fear of honking his own horn lest god smite him, is up for debate.
Didn’t say you had made an excuse - I said I stood in contrast to you, as I didn’t have any, because having Asperger’s is no excuse for being a sexual harassing creep. That’s not the same thing as putting words in your mouth. You may want to work on your reading for comprehension skills.
I saw them open for Mazda and the Also Sprachs.
You said,
So if I didn’t say it was an excuse and Qin didn’t offer that as an excuse why are you putting it out there like someone was excusing his behavior at all, much less for that reason?
I find this disengenuous, at best. To immediately assume that an adherence to religion=being unintelligent shows considerable bias and ignorance. I think few would argue that C.S. Lewis was lacking intelligence, and yet he was dogmatically Christian in his viewpoints. The same can be said for a number of midieval and renaissance thinkers. Read more, dive deeper, formulate a better conclusion, SenorBeef.
I can’t figure out what Senor is talking about. Is religion a stepping stone on the way to a sharp mind? Does he think stepping stones are to be overcome? Because if he does, he’s using them wrong. But I do think religion interferes with and limits peoples intelligence.
I meant the most basic step on your way to developing a sharp mind and a critical worldview is being able to shrug off religion. I phrased that badly. He has not been able to take that simple, basic step.
I may be using a connotation of the word “sharp” that’s unique to my own interpretation, but I tend to think of “sharp” as not only intelligent, but being able to see situations for what they are - to cut through the bullshit and to analyze things critically.
Clearly there are people who’ve been religious, or claimed to be religious (I imagine many of the historical great minds knew religion is ridiculous, but in the western world previous to the last few decades, it would be a seriously compromising - even dangerous thing to admit so publically) who are intelligent. But if they do have the ability to view the world rationally, they have to do a lot of mental gymnastic rationalizations to maintain their sacred cow in the face of the most basic of logic. Religion isn’t a tough one - it’s one of those rudimentary, almost infantile views which falls apart under the most casual of honest scrunity.
If they choose to be blind to it, they can still be intelligent in other, unrelated specific fields, but they worldview is still compromised. They don’t value skepticism and critical analysis highly in their suite of intellectual tools, which renders the entirety of their judgement suspect. And it’s only because religion socially has a special place amongst all the nonsense that you’re even objecting to what I’m saying - if he had astrology as the core of his world view that guided his actions, and I mocked him for obviously not being that sharp, I doubt you’d be rushing to tell me of all the great minds who believed in astrology.
But more than that - it’s hard to quantify because I can’t think of a specific example, but he’s just so smug about religion, as if his religion were immediately apparent to everyone, and they were stupid for viewing anything except through the lens of that religion. As if his religion were prima facie obvious to all.
And that has nothing to do with his age. Religion, as I said, is one of the most rudimentary of intellectual tests - I would expect a sharp kid to be able to shrug it off and articulate their reasoning by the age of 12 at the latest. I know I could earlier than that. It’s unlikely that he’s going to grow into this realization although it’s possible. It’s probably easier for kids to shrug off the shackles of religion - they have the cognitive power, yet haven’t had a lifetime of justifying their world view in the context of their religion to become so emotionally invested in it that they actually lose the ability to consider it.
And again, as convinced as he is of his own brightness, while at the same time being as convinced as he is of the obviousness of his understanding of magic, he comes off as smug about being willfully stupid while thinking he’s brilliant, which is a combination that gets on my nerves.
Ah, SenorBeef, so you are bigoted against everyone who doesn’t share your atheist worldview. Got it.
You talk about him being smug about religion in the same post where you smugly call all views that are not your own “almost infantile”. You fucking hypocrite.
I’m also bigoted against people who don’t share my view that the moon landing really happened, that ghosts aren’t real, and that vaccines aren’t a giant conspiracy by big pharma and the government to make us sick. At least using your definition of bigoted, which seems to mean “thinks people are wrong about it”
Do all of those make me a horrible, smug person too? Or is it all about the special priviledge that religious nonsense receives compared to other nonsense?
And no - one key difference is that I’m calling him smug in general. He’s smug about everything. Being smug and yet not being able to overcome a basic intellectual hurdle is the contradiction that bothers me.
But even if I were doing what you were suggesting - being smug about being non-religious, it wouldn’t be hypocritical - the difference is that I’m obviously right. If I pointed out how Jenny McCarthy was smug about how she thought all parents that were giving them vaccines were stupid, would I too be smug about being pro-vax?
So try again.
You smug asshole. That attitude does make you a horrible person, and is the very thing you are complaining about!
I’m just curious: Do you think he’s a smug asshole in regards to vaccines and the moon landing being giant conspiracies, too?
Huh. I think I just realized for the first time that AClockworkMonkey with a Melon Gun is two different people.
You are bad at thinking and such.
I’m criticizing being smug while holding stupid views. Those conspiracy people who are like “the only reason you don’t accept that everyone in the government is a lizard person is because YOU ARE TOO DUMB YOU STUPID SHEEPLE!!!” is something that annoys me, because they think you’re being dumb on the basis that you’re not making the same obviously wrong conclusion as them.
A person who did the reverse - who said that there’s no reason to suspect anyone is a lizard person, and that people who were convinced that lizard people ran the world - would not be guilty of this, on account of being on the non-idiot side of the equation.
It’s interesting that you give no value whatsoever to whoever is on the side of the truth on this matter. To you, whether or not someone is spouting nonsense is an irrelevant part of the equation, while it’s the entire point of my argument. And somehow you think you’re scoring points against me.
I think he lacks the basic reasoning skills to avoid false equivalencies.
And on preview, I still think that. “Lizard people”? Really?
How are they false? You’re just giving religion an automatic credibility over other beliefs not supported by evidence on account of its social status, not from anything substantive and logical. And that’s all that religion advocates have - they can’t demonstrate that their views are more worthy of respect because they have more evidence for them being correct, they essentially appeal to the idea that religion matters to a lot of people and it has a long history, therefore you can’t look at it critically.
Religion is no different from other unsupported belief systems except by the number of people who believe it.
Are you doing some sort of parody of something or are you being genuine right now? Because I don’t remember adding your name to my mental list of dumbasses, but I guess I can make an entry.
This just isn’t worth it. You are so convinced that you are “right” about religion that you see nothing wrong in insulting other world views, and your smug about it because, well, you’re you. You MUST be right.
Hell, maybe there is no God. I don’t know. What I do know is that if someone calls someone a smug asshole, while being a smug asshole himself, I’m going to call them on it. Not everybody thinks like you do, SenorBeef, and that seems like a hard concept for you. You are just as tiresome as Qin is in that respect.
I wish there was a fallacy named for the “both sides are equally bad!” nonsense you’re spewing.
Maybe there is and I’m not familiar.
You haven’t answered, by the way, why mocking one world view unsupported by evidence is okay and another is not, except to say it’s a false equivelance without actually demonstrating why it’s a false equivelance.
Because I’m not going to be drawn into pedantry, dumbass.
Just know that it is people like you that give atheism a bad name. You are why so many people find atheists so insufferable. It’s the unwavering conviction that they are right, and more importantly, everybody else is wrong.
I know what the first thing that’s going to pop into your head upon reading that is. It’s “But… everybody else is wrong”. That’s what makes your type so fucking insufferable. It’s the true believer syndrome, and yes, that is absolutely dripping with irony.
The first rule of Humanism is “Proclaim the natural dignity and inherent equality of all human beings.” You are not doing that. You are calling most human beings infantile. Because of that I can not respect you.