Christianity, Intellectualism and Fashionable Atheism

A lot of Christians are undeniably stupid... very, very stupid. One quick walk down the road on a Saturday night and you find yourself bombarded with leaflets showing all the strange and interesting things that will inevitably happen to you if you don't sign up for Pastor xyz's special 'cleanse all my sins' seminar ($69.90 + GST). You listen to people talking online, trying desperately to explain how Adam managed to name every animal on earth within a 24 hour period, and you begin to think some very low thoughts of that partiular faith.

Yet, as the majority of people with a passing interest in the subject should have realised is that these people are far from a good representation of the average Christian (probably a better person to represent Christianity as a whole would be someone in Latin America practising a fairly orthodox Catholic brand of Christianity mixed with Ancient Amerindian traditions). Indeed the arguments often used to debase Christianity, its judgemental and only for idiots, are completely baseless. Many of history's finest minds have been religious and Christian; Newton, Coppernicus, Da Vinci, Washington, Wellesly, Lincoln, Churchill; while the largest Christian Church (the Catholic church) preaches that mere mortals have no right to say who will and who won't end up in hell...

In fact most mainstream churches reject ideas such as Creationism and Intelligent Design as fundamentalist doctrine... why then is Christianity cast in such a dim light? And why do so many of the 'intellectuals' in our society chose to become sneering atheists?

The first question is difficult to answer, but the second is relatively easy. Most of society's sneering atheists, in reality, have the intellectual capacity of a baked apple, that is to say, none whatsoever. One only needs to here someone bleeting on their blog about the crusades like some tired record that's been stuck on the same track for the past 600 years to realise most have very little concept of the religion they attack with such relish...

There are probably 2 main causes of this. The first is a teenage rejection of what their parents believe in that continues on into adulthood; "Mum and Dad de me go to church, so I'm not going to believe in God... yeah, we'll see how they like that!" The second is an attempt to fit in with bourgeois, fashionably socialist, "intellectuals". Anyone with pretences of socialism, who drives an audi is instantly suspicious...

In such circles, where the pretense of socialism rules supreme, religion as the "opiate of the masses" has become quite the accepted theory. It gives them grounds to sneer at the poor people without making the real reasons too obvious. Christianity has become a handy avenue.