I’ve seen this a couple of times of late, where people will defend the religious because, well, they don’t know any better. They are somehow rational in their beliefs because they’re stupid.

No, they’re ignorant. That’s not being rational. We have to hold people to higher standards.

 

I’ve pointed this out a lot and sadly, there are people who just don’t want to deal with it. “But that’s just how people are!” I agree. Dumb and ignorant. That isn’t something that anyone ought to be proud of. If you’re an idiot, then you are part of the problem. You need to stop being an idiot, but that makes some people feel bad, so they’d rather be stupid and happy than intelligent and miserable.

That’s just dumb.

People will tell me that the religious are being rational because they don’t know any better, but the ignorance is self-imposed. It’s really hard to defend blind faith these days. The information necessary to prove their faith wrong is easily available, they just want to pretend that it isn’t real because it might make them feel uncomfortable and they care more about comfort than they do about truth.

Take Frank Turek for example. He has no excuse for saying a lot of the things he says. He has been corrected time and time again over the years, but he’d rather lie to people and take their money because he couldn’t care less about the reality. The same goes for pretty much every apologist on the planet. They should know better. They have to know better. It’s hard to imagine that any of them haven’t had their failures pointed out to their faces over and over again.

Yet they don’t care. Granted, they’re mostly frauds. They lie for the Lord for a living. There ought to be a point at which most people stop listening to them, but they don’t because these people are not being rational. They are being purposely ignorant.

The argument that people don’t know any better just doesn’t fly. How could they not? The reality is that they don’t want to know any better. They are much happier reveling in their ignorance. Their ignorance becomes self-imposed. You don’t get to declare your own rationality if you’re just being stupid. You SHOULD know better. It’s your own fault if you don’t.

The definition for rational is “based on or in accordance with reason or logic”. It is not reasonable, for an adult, to hide under the covers and pretend the real world doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter what you want to be true. It doesn’t matter how you feel. Let’s just  call a spade a spade. Dumb is dumb. Ignorant is ignorant. Irrational, whether anyone likes it or not, is irrational. You should know better and you have no excuses for why you don’t. It’s one thing if you’re a child who has no contact with the real world. It’s entirely another for an adult, who should be held to much higher standards, who is just hiding from reality because they hate it.

We’re never going to make things better by patting these idiots on the head and telling them to go play in traffic. We need to call them out on it. We need to insist on being better intellectually. Nobody says it’s going to be easy, but the more that we take away the emotionally-comforting echo chambers that they hide in, the more they are going to be forced into actual rationality. They won’t have anywhere else to turn and that’s a good thing. We need a better class of humanity and pretending that these people are capable, that’s not going to get it for us. It’s just going to make the problems go on forever.

I, for one, am sick of waiting.