CIA Superior: What did we learn?
CIA Officer: Uh…
CIA Superior: Not to do it again.
[pause]
CIA Superior: I don’t know what the fuck it is we *did*, but…

Go find some magic rocks and pretend your cult makes sense, you whackaloon.

Bear in mind that you are dealing with two groups here:

* jerks whose comments boil down to a noun, a verb, and “moron,” and

* adults who are criticizing your claims without making personal attacks.

I suggest worrying more about the latter than the former.

Well, I don’t really, but I like to disagree over the internet. It keeps me fresh!

In order to live with the cognitive dissonance of believing in magic rocks and magic underpants and that native Americans descended from the populations of the Middle East, one must shut off a part of one’s thinking process. The process of which I speak is the one used to analyze data and reach conclusions based on evidence and the application of reason and logic.

Nice theory. Empirically, it doesn’t quite work. In practice, people can and do have false beliefs while still being able to use reason and logic. Ken Miller is one example. If you want to go back far enough, the Founding Fathers are an example. If you really think these people are “dumber than a sweater on a cat,” then you are far more reality-challenged than the people that you rail against.

I asked her how she could believe in a religion founded by a guy with magic glasses. Her response was a tautological fallacy about the book of Mormon. That’s it! That’s all she had to offer! No critical thoughts about it.

In other words, she acted like someone untrained in critical thinking. Lindsey isn’t bird-brained; she’s ape-brained–as are the rest of us. Like most products of evolution, the human mind is a messy kluge that uses quick and dirty heuristics. We are no more natural skeptics than we are natural mathematicians. That doesn’t make Lindsey an idiot; it just makes her unpracticed.

If you can’t tell the difference between being unpracticed and being a moron, what does that make you?

In order to live with the cognitive dissonance of believing in magic rocks and magic underpants and that native Americans descended from the populations of the Middle East, one must shut off a part of one’s thinking process. The process of which I speak is the one used to analyze data and reach conclusions based on evidence and the application of reason and logic.

When one shuts off such a significant process, one becomes vulnerable to such foolishness as believing in magic underpants, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that science is evil, that evolution didn’t happen, and that one must simply believe what one’s cult authorities have instructed one to believe.

Once such a basic part of human reason is deactivated in the human mind, that mind is made less. It is made stupid, moronic, dumber than a sweater on a cat.

Lindsey has shut off that part of her mind and believes in magic underpants.

Just think about that for a moment.

Magic underpants.

Now, magic rocks are bad enough, but they appeal to the moron’s desire for talismanic magic, and to have a focus for magic in tangible objects.

But…magic underpants? That aren’t even very comfortable in the first place?

She has shut off the part of her mind needed to examine evidence and apply logic. She no longer thinks critically. People who refuse, not those who can’t such as the mentally disabled, but those who flat-out refuse to think critically are, in fact, willfully stupid. They wallow in it.

I asked her how she could believe in a religion founded by a guy with magic glasses. Her response was a tautological fallacy about the book of Mormon. That’s it! That’s all she had to offer! No critical thoughts about it. No personal examination of motive. Just regurgitating the same pablum she’s been having crammed into her head by her favorite cult leaders.

So, yes. Lindsey is a moron, an idiot, a stupid jackasss, thick-skulled maroon. There is no room for any other conclusion here. She’s a moron, and that is a direct result of her willful disregard for the facts of physical evidence (and the lack thereof) and a refusal to simply think.

A moron.

And I never argued the “mean first” line, but rather that Lindsey’s invective wasn’t as overblown as tinyfrog’s or Spork’s–especially not Spork’s.

When you said that they “earned” it, since by the same logic they’re also not necessarily stupid, I thought you were justifying Linsey’s outbursts on some kind of retaliatory principle.

This isn’t about coddling irrational beliefs, but about responding to irrationality with more irrationality. I have no quarrel with those who have argued with Lindsey’s beliefs like adults, or more to the point, like honest skeptics, pointing out the flaws in her claims without overreaching and making unsupportable claims about her overall intellect.

Perhaps not with you, but the rest selectively withhold judgement on similar cases when “overreaching” occurs pointed towards someone or a group they don’t like, sometimes coming from themselves. Generalized jokes aside, I don’t think it’s right to call religious individual morons, unless it’s for their general behaviour.

That wasn’t the presumptuous bit that led to Lindsey saying that tinyfrog sounded like a “judgemental moron.” The presumptuous bit was tinyfrog saying that “she will probably decide that Mormonism is right because atheists don’t like her or are ‘mean’.”