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Why Is God Anti-Intellectual?
What more can be said?
1: He's not
2: Many of the greatest colleges were built for religious reasons.
Specifically Christian intellectuals include Freeman Dyson, Robert P. George, Hans Kung, Alasdair MacIntyre, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Cornel West, George Weigel, and probably many others.
I think punishing people for critical thinking and skepticism, and rewarding people for falling headfirst into a belief without evidence, is definitely anti-intellectual.
Quote:
2: Many of the greatest colleges were built for religious reasons.
Many good and evil things have been done for religious reasons. Obviously that tells us nothing.
I think punishing people for critical thinking and skepticism, and rewarding people for falling headfirst into a belief without evidence, is definitely anti-intellectual.
Not everyone who believes in God believes he does this. Fideism is actually rejected in many religions and Christian denominations.
Nor is intellectualism defined in such a two-dimensional way anyway.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength.
It's ridiculous to call this anti-intellectual, as the scriptures hold up against scrutiny far past any other ideology; they always have.
Actually they don't hold up at all, perhaps they did 2,000 years ago, but the more these old writings are examined and the more we discover how things really work, the leakier they become.
I don't believe in a God so I can't really make many presumptions about what it is or isn't. However, I do think that religious belief, in particular, of the very organized kind, requires a certain amount of anti-intellectualism.
Some of the greatest threats to organized religion are in fact the pursuance of intellectual ideas - especially if you listen to what many religious organizations will tell you. We shouldn't forget that the overwhelming majority of religious beliefs stem from a time and place when man was trying to explain the universe in the only way he knew how.
There are an inordinate amount of religious organizations that have their entire foundations built upon interpreting the Bible literally. We should not forget to mention that even the smaller churches and religious organizations often "report" to a larger hierarchy who dictate certain standards of what is to be taught and preached. Many of these "higher institutions" (if we may so call them that) have been around for quite some time. Their dictates of Biblical Hermeneutics have, as a result, been around for quite some time as well.
It's quite obvious that as society evolves, organized religion tends to be the last to follow. Only until vast quantities of their congregation begin to stop going on Sunday mornings due to the final progression of the congregation (a sort of societal evolution that takes place over much time) do they begin to change their stance.
As we've recently witnessed, there are several branches of Christianity that are debating, even considering condoning things such as gay clergy, gay marriage, etc... Fifty years ago, such a thing would have never been heard of. But, society has changed and with it so must the church unless it wants to go broke.
Keeping this sort of mendacious refusal to change in the back of our minds, it should come as no surprise to us as why the churches dictate their God as that classic infantile, temper tantrum-laden, barbaric, genocidal, immature, pathetic despot of the celestia; and with it, the perception of anti-intellectualism.
Because organized religion has mostly not evolved from the 18th century, it should come as no surprise to us that the embrasure of intellectualism in this day and age poses an enormous threat to the churches. The danger that is different now is that the rest of the world has come so far that we have essentially left the churches no option - specifically when it comes to talking about our origins. The churches must either adapt (and evolve - *snicker*) to a more modern framework of thinking or it must stay in the 18th century.
Unfortunately, for many of the churches, they have taken a hard line stance which gives the congregations comprising of the general population of know-nothings the ultimatum that "Evolution = Atheism." There seems to be a profound fear that evolution will cause people to lose faith quicker than any other idea known to man. But, we must ask, who initially perpetuated this framework of thinking? Was it not the churches who found the idea of Darwinian Evolution so threatening they mandated it as an exclusion to their belief systems for fear of widespread panic and, dare I ask, revolt?
So, now the churches are left in a precarious position. They must either perpetuate that there are valid reasons for believing in the absolute garbage Genesis uses as an explanation or they must come to terms with the idea that they were wrong and realize that evolution (among other intellectual ideas) is correct. But, it's going to be a bitter pill to swallow. They've isolated, separated, and indemnified such vast quantities of their followers into this pseudo-scientific following simply to keep them afloat with the originality of their 18th century views that it's going to probably be this way for a while.
Until the overwhelming majority of people begin to embrace intellectualism and begin to turn away from the churches as a result will they change. The minute people start turning away from churches in droves due to a more comfortable and less isolating intellectual position, you will find that all of a sudden "God just loves them intellectuals!"
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