[ExI] Prisoner of bad philosophy: Carl Sagan couldn’t allow himself to hope

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Sun, 5 Aug 2018 at 1:30 am, <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace
> *Sent:* Saturday, August 4, 2018 8:07 AM
> *To:* ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Prisoner of bad philosophy: Carl Sagan couldn’t
> allow himself to hope
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>  For some atheists it is upsetting that so many base their lives around
> religious belief given this, and they feel obliged to tell them why they
> are wrong at every opportunity;  stathis
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> And the other way around:  Yet another reason for atheists to be
> militant:  being lectured to, patronized by people they consider
> intellectual inferiors.  It doesn't have to be that way.  I've been
> 'corrected' by students in my 101 classes and I found it funny (though I
> tried to hide it).
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> bill w
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> Occasionally in our lives we meet someone who is so clearly our
> intellectual superior it is startling.  In the controls biz, we sometimes
> had a very gifted young person who just seem to have that rare talent, an
> ability to see everything, to use the complicated systems of differential
> equations like Tarzan swinging from vines in the jungle, as effortlessly as
> flying.
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> We had a guy come thru like that, exactly one, a PhD candidate when he was
> still in his early 20s.  We have never had one like him before or since.
> He was only there about a year before our customer discovered him and
> somehow coaxed him away.  He was religious to the core, and I do mean
> fundamentalist, tortoises all the way down hardcore fundy.
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> I don’t know how it works or why it works, but somehow religious belief is
> orthogonal to intelligence.
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People can be frankly delusional, symptomatic of a psychotic illness, and
still be intelligent. The more intelligent they are, the more elaborate
their defence of their delusion.

Interestingly, part of the definition of a delusion in psychiatry (e.g. in
the DSM) is that the belief is not held by people from the same culture. If
this  criterion were not included then religious beliefs and other beliefs
held in the absence of evidence would be classed as delusional.
-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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