Education, whilst not necessarily something that makes someone smart or intelligent, can assist with learning things like logic and critical thinking.
Education also provides us the means to understand what evidence is, and learn various things about the world.
For the sake of this article, when referring to theists, I am referring to religious theists and not theists that believe in a god but are without a particular faith to follow.
Frequently when engaging theists online, they often speak/type like they were never taught to [speak] properly. Whilst dyslexic myself, I struggle to take someone seriously who cannot string a coherent sentence together. That said, there are some speaking a second language and are doing the best they can. It does one well to assume everyone is intelligent. At least until proven otherwise. I think as long as we can understand each other, and are speaking in a respectful way, we can overlook things like if someone uses the wrong YOUR as we get what they are saying.
So to re-iterate, I am not talking about those that make a few grammatical or spelling mistakes. I am speaking about those that seem to be using their face to type with.
Not all theists are like this however. There are plenty you can dialogue with in debate groups or anywhere that do seem have their heads screwed on, at least until they start ignoring science/evidence and reach for their particular holy text.
Fear of Education?
There is this horrible fear from some people around facts that go against their interpretation of their faith. They feel these shouldn’t be taught in school or to their children.
For example evolution (or in some extreme cases; gravity) . There are still some people out there spreading the “flat world” myth!
There is also this horrible fear in religions that practice abstinence, at least before marriage, and they believe sex education should be banned from school. Some go so far as to want the biology of how babies are made banned too. This leaves you with some really ignorant people – they may not be stupid, but they appear it. (You could argue that anyone intelligent would go looking for answers, but a lot of people trust what they are told implicitly.)
Below are some examples of theists who seem to have a serious lack of education.
What do we breathe?
Well in some respects she is correct, we breathe AIR, which is about 21% oxygen. It is our lungs that extract the oxygen from the air as part of the respiratory process.
Atheism isn’t a religion either, as I explained in my previous article… but there is no talking to some people.
Where do babies come from?
Well in short it is a chemical reaction. You eat food, a poo comes out… you put a penis in a vagina, and after a certain amount of thrusting the penis ejaculates this gooey stuff called semen. In the semen is sperm which searches for the egg within, when they find each other and the semen burrows into the egg this creates a zygote which then splits its cells over time creating the living foetus that will eventually develop into a baby.
It is more complicated than that, but that paragraph sums it up pretty well – apparently this is something scientists have never been able to explain? This is primary school biology!
What are Dinosaurs? How long have they been around for? When did they die out?
What I like about this one is “Creation Science” is trying to use the scientific method. Unfortunately the application of said method is flawed, and can easily be turned on its head.
Can you observe Dinosaurs living with mankind? – no
Can you do any tests that show that men lived with dinosaurs? – well you can look at the fossil records but what does that tell you? That no dinosaurs lived with man, and that they lived millions of years ago. This is testable evidence.
Have you any proof of this world-wide flood? – no
A creationist is often a literalist and inerrantist. The bible is the exact word of God without error. Can any of them tell me why he called dinosaurs “dragons”, when a couple of thousand years later they would be referred to as dinosaurs? None of them can explain the contradictions either. They don’t even try, they just say “there are not any errors and you are going to hell for thinking there are!”
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I’m Joe. I write under the name Davidian, not only because it is a Machine Head song I enjoy but because it was a game character I used to role-play that was always looking to better himself.
This is one of many things I hope to do with Answers In Reason.
I run our Twitter and IG accounts, as well as share responsibility for our FB group and page, and maintain the site, whilst writing articles, DJing, Podcasting (and producing), keeping fit and more.
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