IQ & Atheism

[alice wellintown]

I admit that I'm not smart enough to claim atheism. A product of the
secularizing academy my agnostic angel does often wrestle with my
Jacob.

The great world religions continue to govern the way in which the
majority of human beings understand things, and guide their lives.
This is a fact that can not be simply attributed to ignorance or
stupidity,  or to tradition,  or power,  or history, or even a
combination of these.

That so many of the faithful are smart, intelligent, creative,
brilliant individuals, in fact one could make of list of brilliant
people who govern their lives by the teachings of one religion or
another, seems to belie the lie given.

It's a little more complex than religious folk are dumb.

Huck aint religious, but he does decide that Jim is white after Jim
does what white Christians in the South are supposed to do but often
fail to. There are good and smart religious folk and there are bad and
dumb atheists with college degrees. As Forrest Gump sez, "Einstein
said we can get from A to B with logic, but to get everywhere else, we
need to imagine." Or something like that. Religion, like civilization,
I think Freud said this, "Is man's invention, but he made it up for
some pretty damn good reasons." Maybe those reasons no longer justify
religion's influence on the lives of the majority of humans. Or maybe,
we're all black on the inside.


"I set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it.
I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't
Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow
get back her silver snuffbox that was stole? Why can't Miss Watson fat
up? No, says I to my self, there ain't nothing in it. I went and told
the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying
for it was "spiritual gifts." This was too many for me, but she told
me what she meant -- I must help other people, and do everything I
could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never
think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I
went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I
couldn't see no advantage about it -- except for the other people; so
at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it
go."

 "Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him dat 'uz
bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, 'Go
on en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one? Is dat like
Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You bet he wouldn't! Well, den, is
Jim gwyne to say it? No, sah- I doan' budge a step out'n dis place,
'dout a doctor; not if it's forty year!"

I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say.