Smart Bastards: Not Your Friend

They say one should never discuss sex, politics or religion in polite company. So, I figure we gotta knock out the other two.

I'm all for spirituality, but not much beyond the rawest sense where much is hard to to put into words. Religion on the other hand, is a lot harder for me to get behind. Let's get back to that though.

Humans are believed to exist in such numbers that we have more or less taken on a relatively consistent pace of existence. One of the consequences is the thing we call intelligence is normalized which creates a bell curve.

Chris Rock has a great analogy for this. I'm too lazy to find the actual bit, but the gist of it goes like this: In school, there were five smart kids, five dumb kids and twenty of the rest of us!

Basically, most people are of an average intelligence (between 85 and 115 IQ's) with just as many unintelligent people as there are above intelligent people. Keep that in mind while I jump to the next point.

Historically, looking at the oldest religions--never mind the council of Versia or any of that, and how the religions initially treated the faithful (and god help you if you weren't counted among the faithful)--they discouraged literacy and education in general, dissension of thought,

Never mind the Lords of the town. Stick to the thankless holy toil that provides their riches and know that you WILL be rewarded in the Kingdom of God! You know, after you're dead. And if you don't, well kids, gather around while we riddle you with stories of where all your worse fears and nightmares are birthed.

Divine is obedience. To question is to endulge in the blasphemous. Tool might not have said it best but they said it well, "There's no love in fear."

And who ruled these common folk? The privileged, who tended to be the educated, who tended to be intelligent.

I don't want to end on a sour note, so let me just say religion can be really good for a lot of people and their communities, and I know many people out there are good hearted folk who feel better about the world after their once a week meeting.

And, just like anything it only takes a few bad examples to leave a bad taste in ones mouth for quite some time. It's unfortunate that many of those bad eggs rise to the positions of power, and they are the ones taking advantage of what should be a good and true institution.

I think problems, social friction if you will, have something to do with an underlying message behind many religions--that there is but a single way to correctly live ones life, which means anything differing from your core beliefs is a threat. Which for me is counter intuitive. Anything true and powerful should stand all the taller and all the straighter to opposition in whatever form.