My Fame Spreads Abroad
Just this morning, I discovered that on another blog out there someone had left a comment about none other than yours truly. And I quote: "still. it makes me wonder how a guy who is so obviously intelligent can believe in the god of the bible. go figure."
A thought ran through my mind, once I was able to stop laughing: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can understand how an intelligent person could think differently from them, and those who can't.
posted by paul @ 7:37 AM
2 Comments:
Psybertron, greetings!
Finding intelligibility in a viewpoint which differs radically from one's own can be a challenge. And I think this is the case regardless of the content of one's own viewpoint.
My own experience has been that, even once I get past the elementary hurdles of unfamiliarity and repugnance, I can still encounter a bar to my finding that other viewpoint intelligible in the seamless, self-sealing nature of my own point of view. One's own POV enforces on one a kind of tunnel vision, like wearing horse blinders. And I think all of us— believer, atheist, scientist, artist, philosopher, whoever— all of us engage in self-preserving rationalizations, at a deep level on which it is very difficult to gain self-awareness. Of course, YMMV, but I suspect not by much.
So I think that "the unintelligibility of X" is almost always an end-user issue, and seldom if ever a problem with "X" itself. Of course, from where I sit (somewhere on a semiotic arc between St. Augustine and Charles Sanders Peirce), there is no unintelligibility, there are only "end-user issues." :-)
Best regards!
rotflmao! ayn rand once said to bill buckley "you're too smart to believe in god."
what makes people who say such things so hilarious is, they (and their defenders) are always the last ones to realize just how pompous they sound.
or let's put it like this: "there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can understand how an intelligent person could think differently from them ABOUT GOD; and those who can't."
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