I get sick and tired of people saying “leave the religious alone, they’re stupid, you can’t stop them from being stupid.” Well, okay, I can’t hold a gun to their head and make them stop being idiots, the fact is that most of them are just ignorant and uninformed, they don’t know any better and have never been trained to think critically about anything, especially religion.
This is an argument that I see used by accomodationists all the time. How dare we pick on the clueless theists? They’re too stupid to know any better! Leave them alone to revel in their ignorance! How dare you try to educate them! Seriously, this is an argument? Don’t try to help people be better?
Sorry, I refuse to play that game. While I understand that the chances of actually making one of these religious numb-nuts more rational is somewhere between slim and none, that’s not going to stop me from trying. Who knows, maybe if you kick them in the head enough times, you might jostle a couple of brain cells into sparking. Even if that’s not the case, maybe it’ll get some of the onlookers to start thinking critically about the theist’s position. If all else fails, even if the theist is a completely lost cause and the audience is just as dim-witted, then fucking with a moron for a little bit has some entertainment value. Getting a chuckle out of a clueless dim-bulb brings a smile to an otherwise dreary day, I heartily endorse it.
Further, even if nobody else does, I actually care what is true and what is not and even if they refuse to acknowledge it, I am absolutely going to push fact and objective reality in any debate, even if it comes to naught in the end. The idea that we shouldn’t seek to educate the uneducated or inform the ignorant is absurd. Should we not bother putting our kids in school because they don’t already know what we seek to teach them and they’d be much happier not having to sit in a classroom for 8 hours a day? What good is information if we’re afraid to pass it on?
Stupidity is a disease, education is the cure. Stupidity isn’t something to be valued, it isn’t something to be admired, it’s something to be hated and those who embrace it should be ashamed to remain that way. Stupid people are only stupid because no one has made it their mission to teach them what they don’t know.
It ought to be the job of every single intelligent, rational person on the planet to seek to teach someone that is stupid and irrational how to better deal with reality. Maybe then, we wouldn’t have so many stupid people around.
