What I'm talking about is a pathetic and pervasive belief that somehow merely mocking the possibility of God equals intelligence. A frail, desperate hope that snorting and rolling your eyes at the notion of something more important than humanity conveys wisdom. It must, right? Because the only other alternative is being one of those feeble-minded believers. One of the sheeple, right, man? (And yeah, using the term "sheeple" is another telltale sign of not being smart.)
While there are certainly many intelligent atheists, the mere act of not believing will not increase IQ. As I've said before, reading Richard Dawkins is as likely to make you a genius as reading the Bible is to make you a saint. There are horrible believers, and there are mentally challenged atheists. Faith, or the lack thereof, has nothing to do with intelligence.
Even worse, so many of today's half-assed atheists pervert the words of older, more articulate atheists with flawed paraphrases they spew across social media. Bertrand Russell -- philosopher, logician and leading atheist -- was clearly a brilliant man, and he's famous for his "celestial teapot" argument regarding the burden of proof: "Nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely." The point is, Russell made that argument in response to Christianity. It was his way of saying, don't tell me I'm going to hell for not believing. If you're the one trying to convert and proselytize, then it's your burden of proof.
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This attractive lady would like you to understand that Russell's teapot was a reaction to the proselytizing nature of the church.
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