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I just want to address the notion that, “you’re so dumb, you deserve everything you get.” I understand the frustration and I even share it sometimes. It’s can be just maddening and make you want to throw up your hands. “You can’t fix stupid.”
However, the implication behind that statement is that, if you are intelligent, you deserve good things. It is like salvation by IQ points, rather than salvation by the blood of Jesus. We are allegedly saved by the power of our own reason and the ingenuity of our own intelligence. Dumb people are not, they are doomed and deserve everything they get.
There’s an old saying I rather like that isn’t theologically sound at all, but I like it because it is snarky and true, “there is a special god for children, fools, and drunks.” People have been observing for centuries that alas, the dumb do not get what they deserve. Often the lowest common denominator seems to get something that more resembles grace, while those who make all the good choices suffer.
The Bible actually says, “the rain falls on the wicked and the just.” Also, Jesus picked up the tab for a bill He did not accrue Himself. So rather than just throwing up our hands and declaring, the dumb get what they deserve, the Bible tells us, “We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.”
That’s a rotten deal. There is no other way to slice and dice it, it is just rotten. It is the rest of us who often clean up the mess and pick up the tab for what the dumb and the evil do, to themselves and to the rest of us. Often the dumb do not get what they deserve, we get the fruit of their labors. Sorry, it just is what it is.
I really dislike this worship of human reason, this idol we’ve built towards human intelligence. Not only is it a lie, it’s very materialistic. It’s based on long since debunked evo/psych theories like, “survival of the fittest.” Speaking of dumb, half the people who promote such notions don’t even understand what that really means. It does not mean, the smartest, most best looking, physically fit people survive and reproduce, therefore humans are progressing into a highly evolved mega race of vastly superior beings. That’s why I appreciate the rather crass movie “Idiocracy,” because it rightly questions and challenges such notions.
In a completely random, birthed from nothing universe, evolution doesn’t “care” whether or not you are going forwards or backwards or “improving” the human condition. Evolution once “decided” to shorten some hummingbird beaks while at the same time elongating some flowers, so they all starved to death and went extinct. And that was that. Pretending that science and morality somehow walk hand in hand is the very definition of dumbness.
And let me tell you, we are super dumb indeed.
I once heard a really good sermon about how God will judge the nations. There’s a bit of collectivism going on there, some joint responsibility that lays waste to our false notions of rugged individualism. I used to really wonder why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and a bit like Abraham I’d ask, what about the innocent? What if there is one good person left in that city? It wasn’t until I read Ezekiel 16:49, that I began to understand, “’Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
We are all accountable for what goes on in our nation, our communities, our families. It takes a lot of humility, a lot of repentance to have a strong family. Heck, somebody smart once said, “marriage is just one act of forgiveness after another.” A country is a bit like a marriage or tribe, a family. Same idea. You have to keep your heart soft and stay humble.
The US used to have a motto, well we still do, it’s just been sitting on a back burner somewhere but, E pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” In 1956 congress changed our official motto to, “in God we trust.” I absolutely believe in trusting God, the problem being we need to remember our roots, we need to slay our divisions and foolishness and work together as one in this country.
Barabbas Me said:
I think calling people “dumb” of stupid for not believing and as “stupid” as calling people dumb or stupid for believing. Neither Belief if God and Faith in Christ Jesus specifically, nor Unbelief, has anything to do with intelligence or IQ (if that is really a measure of true intelligence instead of just Potential for Learning). Many of the most intelligent and thoughtful people thru the ages have both Believed… and Disbelieved in God and Christ. Its a matter of thr Heart and Spirit, not the brain and mind, in my opinion. The continued attempts of what we call “Christian Apologetics” to “prove” God’s existence by science or philosophy or “reason” are nothing more than Christians trying to convince themselves and others that they arent “foolish” to believe what even Paul says in 1 cor 1 that we are “foolish” in the eyes of the world to believe. It’s attempt to “save the Self” when our “Self” is meant to be “crucified with christ” (gal 3.20). Just my 2 cents.
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insanitybytes22 said:
A big amen to that! I enjoy apologetics because they help one to exercise their brain, but at the end of the day we are not saved by our brains or our ability to reason. Faith is more like falling in love, it isn’t always sensible and logical.
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Barabbas Me said:
Ib, we’re tracking here. I don’t believe anyone has ever “come to Faith in Christ” or changed their minds about the existence of God or the Gospel of Jesus by “apologetics”. But many… MANY… have walked away because of it. The vast majority of Believers come to Christ as a simple act of Faith and Trust out of a Need that they perceive and feel within themselves. That Feeling, that Perception is God Himself tugging at their heart and opening their Spirit to Believe. Again, the vast majority of what we call “Christian Apologetics” is “assure” ourselves and other Christians that we did the most “reasonable” and “intelligent” and “rational” thing to believe and that “Facts” support us so we don’t feel “foolish” and so others don’t think us foolish. When that’s not why we believed in the first place and not why we continue to believe. Faith is a conscious decision and a direction to believe the “unbelievable” because God says it’s True. We Trust Him with our lives and our destinies because He alone is Trust “Worthy”. Not because we’ve “sussed it all out”, but because we Believe that He has.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Absolutely, we are on the same page with this. I call myself insanitybytes in part because I grew up with very intelligent, very atheist parents who really wanted me to be more sane, more rational, and therefore reason my way away from faith. You see this same idea on the internet with the evangelizing atheists who roam about, a reverse kind of apologetics.
The thing is, once you’ve experienced the Lord, one simply cannot “unexperience” Him. If someone can simply be talked into faith, than someone can simply be talked out of faith. That is why we need to, “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not into your own understanding.”
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jsneese62 said:
I seldom use the word dumb, but have been known to tell people their actions were stupid. I have known some truly intelligent people (book smarts) that were rather dumb when it comes to common sense. Take my daughter for instance when she became hooked on meth the first time she was young and I gave her the benefit of a doubt she just didn’t know what it would do to her. When she got clean and then a few months later she started taking it again it was just plain dumb on her part. She knew and there was no doubt what it would do to her and she chose not to fight it and it nearly killed her. Some may say I am mean for saying what I just did, but they are not the one that watched their child go from a healthy woman to an 86lb skeletal parody of herself. They also did not cry almost daily for 3 years wondering if she was dead. She will be 40 years old next month and has now been clean for decades and she will tell you what she did to herself and me was dumb.
Being book smart is all well and good, but it is not even close to what is important. Your heart and what lives in there is important and as you said beauty, fitness, intelligence according to the world all really mean nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:13 tells us what is important faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love. If humans could come to the point of truly loving one another many things would start falling into place.
I look around at the world and many will tell you animals are not as intelligent as humans, but being the owner of three cats with very distinct personalities I can tell you they often display more love and even intelligence that many humans I know. When any of the three are hungry and there is no kibble on their plate they will come to me and start rubbing against me and purring. Even if I ignore them for an hour or two they will still just love on me. They do not lash out when they do not get their way right away. Even the insane kitten (her name is Roxi) knows doing something mean or stupid will not get her what she wants. Then there is Rowan who knows how to turn on the charm and how to be so cute as to melt your heart, and Olivia who is very concerned about everyone, but not herself most of the time. I am not saying humans need to act just like this, but there are lessons to be learned here.
As for people getting what they deserve we all deserve death it doesn’t matter how smart, dumb, or stupid you are.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Ha! You are so right about animals, they often seem a lot smarter than we are and more sensible. Also, when they do have behavioral issues, 90% of the time it is the result of some trauma from having had to live with crazy humans! I can totally relate to that.
Also true about how many really intelligent people get caught up in addiction. There is some research that shows exactly that. We aren’t entirely sure why.
Good point, we do all deserve death. It’s sometimes called the great equalizer because it’s puts us all in the same state, the same condition.
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jsneese62 said:
I can verify that most behavior problems in animals living with crazy humans. I spent most of my younger years rescuing animals especially from abusive people. I rescued a dog at one point that I eventually had to have euthanized physically there was nothing wrong with him, but his mind and spirit were completely broken. He had failure to thrive and you seldom see this in animals. I have rehabilitated abused, neglected, and starved animals and ended up keeping many over the years because I was afraid others would not be able to deal with their lingering problems. Two kinds of people I have to battle to keep hate out of my heart for and that is pedos and animal abusers.
I also find animals often far more sensible and they certainly don’t throw tantrums like humans do. Mine just steals forks and terrorizes the kitchen.
I think many times really intelligent people get into addiction because many times they have a very hard time relating to “normal” people. So I think it is part loneliness and depression.
Death is definitely the great equalizer rich, poor, smart, dumb, or stupid.
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Citizen Tom said:
1 Corinthians 1 distinguishes between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God. Unless we are called by the Father to believe in the Son, we cannot do it. We won’t want to do it. Until God renews our hearts and minds, we are creatures of this world. Reason and logic don’t matter.
Different people see and understand different things. Some emphasize their emotions. Some are more comfortable exercising logic and reason.
The Bible provides us both logical and emotional reasons to believe. So, we need to use both as best we can.
God loves us. The Bible shows us how much God loves us.
The Bible provides us reason to believe God exists and evidence that His Son lived, died, and rose from the dead.
Peter told us to be prepared to give the reason for the hope that is in us. We should be prepared to explain why we believe. We should prepared to explain why we believe God loves us, why we believe the Bible.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Amen, Tom. I would say there is kind of a 3 fold cord there, we trust in the Lord with all our heart, mind, and soul. So if your reason fails you at some point, you still have your heart and soul. Somebody smart recently said, “God will tell you things that your brain hasn’t caught up with yet.” It’s not that reason has no value, it’s that human reason is very limited.
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Citizen Tom said:
insanitybytes22
I think our ability to reason has great value, but we cannot think as logically as we should until God has humbled us.
After the Father calls us to Jesus, we begin to perceive just how much God loves us. We also begin to perceive how small we are, how marvelous it is that God takes so much notice of us. God loves me?
It is once we have been so humbled that we start obeying God’s commands to love Him and our neighbors. Then we begin to understand just how awful it is to be haughty and proud. Because a proud soul is indifferent to others, someone who is thoroughly proud can only perceive God’s Creation through their own eyes. Thus, pride urges each of us to see our self as the center of the universe. Pride says there is no God because “I” am God, and that is insane.
A prideful soul may as well perceive himself as a hammer and everyone else as nail. Until we surrender our pride, we cannot see anything the way God created it. We cannot know God because we don’t want Him to exist. We can only use other people; we cannot love them.
Until we surrender our pride, we cannot think as we should. Because our every thought is about our self, we will not seriously consider the rest of Creation. We will just think about who and what we can use.
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Silence of Mind said:
Stupid has consequences. That is the meaning of, “Your so dumb…” And channeling the Clint Eastwood character from, The Unforgiven, just before he blew the villain’s brains out, “Deserve’s got nuthin to do with it.”
Stupid has consequences, is simply a natural law.
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insanitybytes22 said:
I don’t think it is natural law at all. I know dozens of truly stupid and evil people who have never suffered a consequence in their entire life. I also know many good and virtuous people who seem to suffer. So suffering is not necessarily the result of our intelligence or morality.
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Silence of Mind said:
Insanity, That you can’t see consequences for stupidity is a tribute to your own blindness. Please do not turn blindness into a virtue. That would mean you are one of them. Something I have suspected for many years now.
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ColorStorm said:
Yikes silence. Your ‘suspicion’ is suspect.
You do not want to wake up the sleeping lion!
The good lady here is one of the most charming and consistent of thought in blogsville, so you are out to lunch on that bad call.
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Silence of Mind said:
Great Lion, And the earth is flat.
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ColorStorm said:
Tkx S/
But you are missing the greater point of my classroom query, which btw, many younger students adhere too.
Surely you can take the opportunity to explain, simply, what u would present to your students. Don’t be like atheists who change the subject.
And take note of how calm I am- even when charged as a lunatic- which many atheists claim.
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Silence of Mind said:
Great Lion, I addressed your classroom query in the Christian classical tradition that led to the rise of Western Civilization. That is what I present to my students. Both you and Insanity reject the Christian classical paideia which puts both of you in the atheist camp. The atheist camp is where everything is just a matter of opinion.
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ColorStorm said:
I saw a kid today S who needed a massive spanking by his mother. He thought he was the cats meow by determining his tantrum was more important that 30 adults. It was truly nauseating. Tkx his parents for allowing this.
This kid will grow up and accept the spoon fed ‘science’ not because he is smart, but (per the post here) adults were dumb
You lose all credibility when you accuse good people of infiltrating the atheistic bleachers. Go ahead and insult me, but you really need to apologize to ib for your incessant accusations of her that have no basis in reality.
You are lucky i am not in your class, I wouldn’t stand for it.
But u are going into the weeds and interrupting this post when u have free reign to offer your ‘evidence ‘ at my site where the query lives.
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ColorStorm said:
Wasn’t that a song by C. Simon, ‘your so dumb, u prob think this post is about u?’
But good stuff, I noticed my most recent has a few overlappings ideas too, with the evo- 🙂
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insanitybytes22 said:
LOL! Vanity, all is vanity. I think our vanity and pride often deceive us, so we are quick to claim intelligence after the fact and proceed to praise ourselves for not being nearly as dumb as the guy who stuck a fork in the toaster.
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jsneese62 said:
Ha! I stuck a fork in a wall socket as a child I learned from that stupidity pretty fast. Other things took a bit longer.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Lol! I unplugged a fridge while up to my ankles in water once.
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jsneese62 said:
I still think we are related lol.
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jilldomschot said:
I used to get really angry with the jokes about how stupid people shouldn’t breed. Margaret Sanger also believed that. The truth is low IQ people can make wise decisions, and high IQ people can be as dumb as a box of rocks. I refer you to the educated class who thinks it’s cool and trendy to turn their kids into transgendered wrecks.
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jilldomschot said:
I should add the caveat that no one makes those jokes around me anymore, probably because my days are spent around Catholics.
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insanitybytes22 said:
You make a really good point, Jill. Our protestant work ethic and rugged individualism is really dominating the culture right now, and you just don’t find that same kind of thing as much among Catholics. The downside to all that is a kind of self determinism where we falsely believe we are in control of everything and everything we have is exclusively the result of our own efforts. Even just to run a business first requires roads and bridges, utilities and infrastructure. The environment needs to be somewhat conducive to such things.
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The Night Wind said:
China abandoned its disastrous One-Child Policy a few years ago, and replaced it with one where high-IQ couples can have unlimited children, but it’s restricted for low-IQ people. We’ll see how well that works out for them (I have a suspicion that it won’t).
Speaking of Catholics: I recently re-read Pope Leo XIII’s famous encyclical on Capital and Labor (1891). It’s still very relevant today. In only about 3 pages, the Pope schools both the Woke Left and Rugged Individualist Right—along with a dose for the ruling class—on their Christian duties and answers the false premises that many current debates are based upon (e.g. that the family is outdated, that survival of the fittest is Natural Law, and he explodes the myth that Class Warfare has any basis in fact).
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13rerum.htm
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The Night Wind said:
Social Darwinism is interesting concept. One old retired doctor I know said that “to believe in Social Darwinism, one has to believe that billions of years of Evolution from the primordial swamp to higher life forms in the ape; from the ape to man, and man to civilization finally reached its highest and most glorious state by producing the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Prince Charles.”
It’s hard to come up with a better argument than that…
Another noteworthy thing is how the Red Pills are big believers in Social Darwinism and Evo-Psych, but it never occurs to their followers that their ‘superior’ leaders have to live on donations, can’t form stable relationships, are always getting kicked out of places, or getting thrown in jail: it seems that would logically imply that their enemies are actually the most fit.
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insanitybytes22 said:
All very good points! That is a great quote, too, darkly humorous.
A lot of red pills really are heavily into evo/psych stuff, much that has been clearly debunked in the last half century. I like the bumper sticker that just says, “oh, evolve already.”
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Clyde Herrin said:
Reblogged this on clydeherrin.
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