The Stupidity Factor in the Survival of Religion

And the major role of ignorance as well

Mike Pence has declared that he doesn’t believe in evolution, but has also said that, when he dies, he’ll asked god if evolution is fact or fiction. This represents a special brand of stupidity, fortified by colossal ignorance. The literature on evolution is vast—is Pence just unaware of it, and can’t be bothered by curiosity? And does he really imagine that a creator deity with billions of galaxies under supervision will take the time to sit down for a chat with him about stuff he should have learned about before he died? Of course, when such a prominent Christian voices his rejection of evolution, this gives permission to the devout to embrace the stupidity and ignorance. I personally witnessed another special brand of stupidity a few years ago—I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating: ten days after the Sandy Hook school massacre in December 2012 (20 kids and 6 adults murdered), a devout Catholic woman offered this explanation: “God must have wanted more angels.” Not even the pope is stupid enough to say such a thing—although the stupidity level at the Vatican is incredibly high.

 
I’ve known a man for many years, who—just a few sentences into any conversation—will ramble on and on: his analysis of other people based on his certainties about astrology. I’ve always let it pass, but I’m sure that if I asked him to explain his epistemology, he would give me a blank stare. He operates with total confidence in the reliability of confirmation bias. We’ve all run into, or heard about, people who claim that the earth is flat, that the Moon landings were faked, that chemtrails are evil realities, that the Holocaust never happened. All of these ideas are blends of stupidity and ignorance. 
 
Carlo M. Cipolla began the Introduction of his 1976 little book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity with this observation:  
 
“Human affairs are admittedly in a deplorable state. This, however, is no novelty. As far back as we can see, human affairs have always been in a deplorable state. The heavy load of troubles and miseries that human beings have to bear as individuals as well as members of organized societies is basically a by-product of the most improbable—and I would dare say, stupid—way in which life was set up at its very inception” (p. 15).
 
Cipolla notes that stupidity can be found at all levels of society—those of whom we would expect it (the earth is flat, the Moon landings were faked)—but he also maintains that it can be detected even among Nobel laureates. That is, all humans are subject to biases and bizarre ideas we might have been raised with—and that persist despite advanced education. 
 
How can Christian apologists not come to mind? It is their business to defend the blend of ancient superstition and magical thinking that the first century Jesus cult advocated. They probably feel this intense need because of the desperate desire to escape death: they cling to the hope of eternal life. The ancient superstition and magical thinking must be made to look respectable. But what an uphill battle it is! 
 
One of the fundamentals—actually the crucial one—is the resurrection of Jesus. But it’s a borrowed idea! There were quite a few other resurrected savior gods worshipped well before Jesus came along. And the New Testament itself dilutes the idea. It includes the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead by voice command (John 11), and there is nothing whatever in that story to indicate that Lazarus didn’t die again. In Matthew 27 we find the bizarre account of many people coming alive in their tombs at the moment Jesus died on the cross; this is found only in Matthew—and again there’s no hint as to their fate after they toured Jerusalem on the morning that Jesus resurrected. And what to do with Jesus once he was resurrected? We are told in Acts 1 that he ascended to heaven, but that is possible only in naïve first-century cosmology. There is no heaven—in the sense of a realm where a god resides above the clouds and below the moon. So the Acts 1 ascension story is fantasy, mythology. The New Testament authors are guilty of a cover-up: they didn’t report what happened to Jesus in the end.
 
Moreover, the gospel accounts of the events on Easter morning are a mess: so much confusion and disagreement. Robert Conner has pointed out too that no one saw Jesus resurrect—despite his supposed prediction that it would happen. Conner makes the case that the gospel resurrection accounts seem to draw on ghost folklore at the time; see his Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story.
 
Yet Christian apologists have gone to such great lengths to demonstrate that Jesus rose from the dead, despite the abundantly clear qualification of this belief as superstition. The apostle Paul, who never met Jesus, apparently knew almost nothing about him, and bragged that he received no information about Jesus from the disciples who knew him, added magical thinking to this shallow theology: “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That amounts to a magic spell. In John 6:53-58 we read that the blood and flesh of Jesus, when eaten by his followers, are magic potions guaranteeing eternal life. My suggestion earlier that the stupidity level at the Vatican is high is based in part on its claim that transubstantiation guarantees the reality of these magic potions.  
 
It's also grotesque that the Jesus had to serve as a human sacrifice, an ugly aspect of religion found in other cults as well. How could a loving god require a human sacrifice in order to enable him to forgive human sins? “Christ died for you” is such a common refrain in Christian piety. But how does this additional fragment of magic possibly make sense? 
 
Devout churchgoers, who have been carefully groomed by Sunday School and Catechism, tend to accept all these concepts; they embrace them, never bothering to learn the context from which these ideas arose. Critical thinking skills, skepticism, are not virtues. Especially when eternal life, escape from death, getting to live with Jesus forever, are the rewards of trusting what the clergy claim are unassailable truths, and what Christian apologists have been defending for such a long time. 
 
But we can suspect that doubt is just below the surface with so many of the folks who show up for church. In fact, that may be one of the reasons that mainstream churches have been losing ground in recent decades. There is no much that just doesn’t seem to compute, especially for those who make the effort to read the gospels carefully, and who thus note the flaws, contradictions and absurdities. They may not actually challenge their clergy: “Please show us where to find the

reliable, verifiable, objective evidence that will enable us to believe what otherwise seems to qualify as superstition and magical thinking.” What devout Christians—including the apologists—feel in their hearts fails to qualify as a sound foundation for believing.
 
Sam Harris got it right in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason: “Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.”
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.