Category Archives: Religion

Religion of the West

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When listening to an interview of Richard Spencer on Red Ice, the thing I found most interesting is the bafflement by supposed race realistic people as to why the people in charge of the West seem to have a death wish. John Derbyshire calls is ethnomasoichism, a form of self-hatred that extends to everyone like them. That is not a great term, but it is what we have right now.

Listening to Spencer fumble through an explanation, he said one thing that caught my attention. He kept coming back to the idea of a spiritual awakening or renewal that he thinks will precede a restoration of national identity. He was not all that clear on the point so I may be misunderstanding him.

Regardless, it brought to mind something about the Roman Empire from the second century forward. That is, the proliferation of odd cults, mystics and what we would think of as Eastern mysticism. Hadrian was into the Eleusinian Mysteries. One of the later emperors fell in the grips of a mystic whose name escapes me at the moment. Of course, Christianity got going in this time, starting from a Jewish heresy into a full blown religious movement.

None of this would be possible if the old gods and the old ways were still satisfying the people. After all, there’s no need for a new religion if the old religion is scratching that itch that is there in every human society. One of the things that’s true about the Roman empire is it was a miracle it did not collapse at any point after the reign of Commodus. The reason the people, including the ruling elite, were looking for new religions is they had largely lost faith in the old one.

We tend to look at the West as a collection of countries and people located in Europe, jostling with one another for supremacy. Another way is to look at the West as the Christian flowering, the Christian era. Starting from the second century, Christianity evolved and spread until it was largely formalized in the fourth century. The fall of the Western Roman empire in the fifth century let Christianity spread throughout Europe with the conversion of barbarians over the next two centuries.

What’s happening today is Christianity is dying out in the West. No one in the European ruling class is animated by his Christian faith. In fact, they mostly mock those remaining Christians in their own lands. In the US, No one in the ruling party is Christian. Some fake it for old time sake, but otherwise there are no Christians in the Democratic Party. The GOP still has some Christians, but most of that is for show, as their party is the natural home of the remaining Christians in America.

It’s a conceit of the modern ruling elites that they have shrugged off the sky gods and the oogily-boogily, but it is just a conceit. Belief is one of the oldest of human traits, co-evolving with speech. Belief, like all traits, varies from person to person and between groups. To think that this trait suddenly fell out of the human animal a generation ago is simply ridiculous.

That does not mean there always has to be an invisible man in the sky. An anthropomorphic god or gods probably came along long after the first conceptions of the super natural. There are plenty of modern examples of belief without the man-like god or gods. Buddhists, for example, have no invisible men in the sky. Natives of the Americas did not have man-like gods.

The point here is that the collapse of Christianity as a legitimizing and organizing faith has left the people in charge searching for a replacement. Socialism and Communism filled the void until they were laughed off the stage by reality. Even the Soviet rulers threw in the towel on the spiritual side of Bolshevism after Stalin.

The grasping around at these crazy fads like climate change and anti-racism is just a search for some legitimizing answer to the eternal why. Even silly materialist fads like Apple and Uber are driven by the need to the fill the spiritual void. It’s not an accident that every dedicated Apple user has  memorized the standard response to why they over spend for a bit of electronics.

This is a blog post, not a dissertation so I’m going to keep and short and stick with the broad outlines, but I think what’s driving this weird worship of the alien, specifically brown people migrating north, is spiritual envy. They envy the natural identity and belonging these people have as members of the oppressed. Generously inviting the noble savages into your neighborhood scratches that age old spiritual itch.

The cults and mystic faiths that floated around the late Roman Empire borrowed heavily from the old ways. Even Christianity cherry picked items from the old pagan religions. Climate change obviously borrows heavily from the Jewish Bible. Cultural Marxism looks a like liberation theology, without the Christianity. It’s Gnosticism updated to the modern era.

The absurdity of these weird cults and theodicies suggest we are in that transition period between the end of the old ways and the birth of some new way. Something is going to take the place of Christianity, just as Christianity took the place of the Greco-Roman gods. I have no idea what, but I will not be around to see it.

This is obviously a huge subject and I’m still noodling my way through my own thoughts on it.

The Homo Wars

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The last Great Progressive Awakening started in the 1950’s as American Progressives began looking for an alternative to Communism as their organizing religion. The Soviet Union, despite the attempts by major newspapers like the New York Times to normalize political murder, was an embarrassment to the American Left. If you read the accounts of David Horowitz, his generation of radicals were ashamed of the old CP-USA types, like his parents.

Radicals latched onto the Civil Rights Movement. What better way to freak out the squares, like their parents, than to invite the blacks in for dinner? So the New Left jumped into the cause, not to help blacks, but to harass white people like their parents. At the heart of radicalism is a tantrum against biological reality. Eventually, we all become our parents and radicals rail against that by indulging in juvenile and dangerous political causes well into adulthood.

This round of radical lunacy started in the 1990’s with the disappointment that was Bill Clinton. The Progressives really thought he was going to be JFK 2.0 and when he was basically JFK 2.0, rather than the imaginary version of JFK, Progressives began to radicalize again. The result has been a war against normal Americans for the last two decades.

Unlike the last wave, this one has been a bit more diverse. Blacks have proven to be unreliable victims. Like the Soviet Union, it is hard to ignore the bodies stacking up. The near total absence of demonstrable discrimination was also a problem. Whites have been reordering their lives to accommodate the sensibilities of black people for a long time now. A new civil right movement was just not practical.

Instead, they went for homosexuals, sexual deviants, immigrants and single white women. Blacks, as a voting block, have been taken for granted by Progressives for a long time now so there’s no reason to cater to them, other than when they can be used as a cudgel. Blacks have become just another bit of furniture in the Progressive fun house, so the Left could go after Hispanics and gays without fear of alienating blacks.

When building a coalition of bitter weirdos, the bitterest will always rise to the top. In the 60’s, the pasty-faced white kids in the student movements gave way to the bitter (and violent) weirdos of the black power movement. In the 90’s, the most bitter and deranged weirdos turned out to be the homosexuals. As a result, the Great Fag Wars have raged for close to two decades now.

Take a look at some recent skirmishes. Razib Khan gets hired and fired in one day by the NYTimes, allegedly for hanging out with people that say bad things about immigrants. The head of that lynch mob was a deranged homosexual working at the homosexualist site called Gawker. If McInnes is accurate, the Gawker guy just wanted to be an asshole.

Of course, the recent turmoil in Indiana, where very modest protections against predacious homosexuals were put in place, has been led by homosexual fanatics like Tim Cook, the gay ruler of the Apple cult. Homosexuals from around the country have been taking to the Internet, threatening anyone and everyone who supports protecting Christians from these rampaging mobs. ISIS has to be wondering why we care what they do to their Christians.

Even the rape hoax stuff on college campuses is being championed by homosexual activists. Rolling Stone is run by the flamboyant homosexual Jann Wenner. The homosexualist site Gawker got in on the act, defending what was clearly a fabricated story. The New Republic, run by the billionaire homosexual fascist Chris Hughes, was also on the case, trumpeting the veracity of the story, despite their history with the fabulist that wrote it.

Blacks, in the long run, turned out to be poor mascots for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Government discrimination against blacks, however, was a real problem and overturning it was a good thing. Denying people full citizenship based solely on their ethnicity is no way to run a republic. The train load of other stuff that came along with overturning those laws may have been a disaster for the country, but it was right to overturn those laws.

No such dynamic exists here. This is a war on Christianity and a war on traditional Americans. There’s nothing that can be plucked from the tidal wave of sewage coming from the Left that one can hold up as a benefit. It’s all filth and the people riding the wave are the worst elements of society, the deviants.

I have no predictions as to how this ends. The last Great Progressive Wave collapsed in an orgy of drug abuse and violence. This wave will end similarly. The last time, however, American society had huge storehouses of surplus. Today, we are showing the signs of exhaustion, with limited reserves to blunt the denouement of this wave. My sense is the great homo wars will not end well.

The Struggles of Conservative Inc.

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The war on Christian pizza makers has the professional Right sorely vexed. I think most of their outrage is legitimate. They truly are offended by this latest assault on normal Americans. The fund raising by the pizza joint in Indiana suggests normal Americans are growing weary of the lunatics and their causes. Still, I think a part of what vexes the professional Right is their fear of stating the obvious conclusion.

That conclusion is you cannot have freedom of any sort without freedom of association. If you must get permission from the state to associate or disassociate from others, you have no freedom. The state may allow you some options, but everything you do must come with a permission slip. Otherwise, putting two people who hate one another in the same room ends up with blood on the walls.

Here’s a recent screed from National Review struggling to avoid stating the obvious.

Policies come to us with principles attached to them, and when debating public policy we should consider the principles not only of legislation that has passed but also of legislation that has been rejected. No one to my knowledge is discussing where the principles implied in the Left’s rejection of the RFRA lead. Responsible statecraft entails an examination of a principle’s logical conclusion. In the case of liberalism, the conclusions to which its principles lead help us see just how deeply opposed those principles are to the constitutional order we’ve inherited.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites compelled speech. When photographers are forced under threat of fines to shoot weddings or religious services that they believe are immoral, the assumption is that we are sometimes legally bound to participate in certain kinds of speech, and the state becomes the arbiter of what that speech is in specific instances.

Well, no. Forcing someone to work for someone else is not forcing them speak. It is forcing them to participate. Put another way, it is compulsory association. The state is saying to the photographer, “We really don’t care about your opinions of these people. You must do what we say, act as we say or else.”

Of course, the reason Andrew Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the guy who wrote the piece in question, must fetishize speech is he cannot mention association. To do so, to draw the obvious conclusion from the events in Indiana and elsewhere, would risk his job and career. Rand Paul almost saw his career come to end in 2012 because he dared utter this conclusion.

The reason, ostensibly, is that letting stores refuse service to homos would lead to stores not serving blacks. That has things exactly backwards. Separate public accommodations in the South were falling apart on their own. Basic economics makes such practices self-limiting and self-destructive. The reason Progressives pushed through laws against private discrimination was to eliminate private association.

It’s rather amazing how easily Americans were willing to surrender their liberty, but there it is. Now, there’s no reason to think things like Christianity, private clubs, fraternities, etc will hold up much longer. After all, if you cannot deny admissions based on your own peculiar criteria, why have an organization at all?

The thing I think is vexing to the professional Right is the mounting proof that they were wrong about the Left. They were convinced that the “other side” (as if there are only two sides) was acting in good faith, but just need convincing. Recent events show that to be nonsense, but Conservative Inc. can’t bring itself to admit it.

Which leads to my final point. When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites the imposition of state-enforced morality. The Left requires obedience and punishes dissent. It insists that all citizens must, against their will, act only in a manner that liberalism judges to be accommodating and politic. Anyone acquainted with progressive thought knows that it is founded on unexamined assumptions, but seldom until now have we seen its unhinged hostility unmasked, as the Left reacts to our defense of a cherished freedom written into our Constitution.

There’s no evidence from Progressives that they see any of this as a flaw or even unintentional. Yes, they fully expect to impose their morality – at gunpoint if necessary – on the rest of us. That’s how political cults operate. Hell, it’s how Christianity operated for over 1,000 years. But, admitting this is the case would point out that Conservative Inc has been wrong for thirty years now.

The Religious Divide

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Way back in the olden thymes, “spiritual” people eschewed traditional religion, in favor of pseudo-paganism and Eastern mysticism. Along with it came sub-cults like saving the whales or saving the environment. Concern for people and things over the horizon is the hallmark of new age religion. Most of these people were miserable to their families and friends, but they had nothing but love for mother earth, nature and oppressed people living far away.

All of that nonsense from the 60’s and 70’s was just religion for people who liked the benefits of public piety, but were not into any of the sacrifices. They had special outfits to wear in public, signaling their goodness. They ate strange foods and got into meditation and yoga. Bumper stickers were a big thing. it was a way for them to impose their values on you without taking an risk. That’s the thing with the self-righteous and publicly pious. It grace without sacrifice for them.

Still, they were a minor nuisance, for the most part. Cleaning up rivers and protecting wildlife is the sort of stuff rich societies can do without causing too much trouble. It is what economist call public goods. Despite the fact the people behind these efforts were mostly monomaniacal weirdos, like Ralph Nader, the goals appealed to people’s Christian sense of duty.  It’s the same way the social-welfare laws tag along on the people’s sense of Christian charity.

This arrangement started to change in the 1990’s. Bill Clinton felt it necessary to be open about his Christian faith. It was, in part, to make inroads into the South, but also appealed to northern Catholics. By 2000 Al Gore was dismissive of religion entirely while Bush was the Evangelical. That’s the source of the great divide that has roiled the nation ever since. People who worship the old gods versus those who worship the new gods and have zero tolerance for the old gods.

Obama comes along in 2008 and is clearly non-Christian. Maybe he is a Muslim or maybe he is simply not religious. His membership in the crazy black church hardly qualifies as religious. The clear message was that unlike the people who put Bush in office, Obama was not a Christian. The last election featured a man who never attends services and a man who belongs to a weird cult that is alien to the Judeo-Christian traditions of America.

The point of all of this is to underscore just how far Christianity has fallen in public estimation. In 1980, Reagan seeded his talks with references to the Bible, on the assumption everyone would know what he meant. His opponent was a deeply religious man who felt comfortable discussing his relationship to God on television. Today, it would seem strange to see a presidential candidate discussing his relationship with God or his duties to his church as a Christian man.

One thing you learn when reading about population genetics is religion is near universal. We have evidence of religious practice going back as far as we have evidence of modern human activity. Science thinks religion evolved as one of the first human traits. If you take a step back and look at religion as a subgroup of mass movements, then it is even more obvious that faith and belief are necessary human traits that are integral to our understanding of the world.

Religion was most likely the first solution to the free rider problem. Not only does guilt and moral suasion push the free loader to pull his weight, it justifies taking harsh action against those who take more than they give. Belief in the common gods and common morality would have obvious reproductive advantages. A natural bias toward religiosity would, over many generations, bake belief into the human animal. Like all traits, it would manifest itself more prominently in some and less so in others.

That brings me back to the collapse of Christianity in America. Take a look at church attendance by state. Where are you more likely to find, for example, global warming fanatics? Vermont or Mississippi? If you look at the bottom ten states, there you find the most deeply committed liberals and the most deeply committed warmists. Gaia worship, manifested as climate concern, is the religion filling the void left my Christianity for the people least connected to Christian faith and heritage.

Whether you want to call AGW the master cult, encompassing the lesser cults of environmentalism, or you lump all of it into the same bucket with the other progressive fads, there’s no escaping the religious overtones to all of it. Here’s an interesting bit from a hard core believer site called Think Progress. These are the sort of folks who invest a lot of time counting heretics. Their map is revealing. It is not just party preference dividing the nation. It is religion.

The question is whether it was the vacuum left by the collapse of Christianity in these areas that allowed this pagan faith to spread or do the causal arrows point in the other direction? The American Left has been hostile to Christianity since the end of World War II, mostly in order to include Jews in their cause. Perhaps as the people of these areas became more liberal, church attendance dropped and these weird fads spread or maybe as Christianity died, the people went crazier.

Yes, It Is A Religion

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Thinking of Progressivism as a religion is useful, but it gets a lot of resistance from so-called conservatives. Talking about it as a cult gets even more push-back. The truth is, few liberals know much about why they believe what they believe. They just do and they don’t spend a lot of time examining it. That’s how religion works. Few Catholics understand why they take communion. They just do. The same applies to the Left, even more so, in that examining the faith is treated as heresy.

If you look at the most liberal states in the country, you find the lowest levels of church attendance. On the other hand, states with highest church attendance tend to be the least inclined to vote Left. For example, the last election featured six continental states where Obama won more than 60% of the vote. That’s California, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York and Vermont. Everyone of those states, except Maryland, is at the bottom of church attendance numbers according to Pew.

At the other end of the spectrum, the states that went for Romney in the last election are Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arkansas and Kentucky. These are states with high church attendance. You have to get down to 20th on the church attendance list before you find an Obama state. Even if you assume religion is simply falling out of favor, traditional culture is also a good indication of voting habits. Steve Sailer tied together marriage and voting, which tracks close with church attendance.

If that’s not compelling, here’s a NYTimes profile of former Mayor Bloomberg.

Michael R. Bloomberg, making his first major political investment since leaving office, plans to spend $50 million this year building a nationwide grass-roots network to motivate voters who feel strongly about curbing gun violence, an organization he hopes can eventually outmuscle the National Rifle Association.

Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, said gun control advocates need to learn from the N.R.A. and punish those politicians who fail to support their agenda — even Democrats whose positions otherwise align with his own.

“They say, ‘We don’t care. We’re going to go after you,’ ” he said of the N.R.A. “ ‘If you don’t vote with us we’re going to go after your kids and your grandkids and your great-grandkids. And we’re never going to stop.’ ”

He added: “We’ve got to make them afraid of us.”

That’s obviously insane. When you’re a billionaire, saying crazy things maybe makes you eccentric. If he was still hustling a sales route and was saying nutty things like this, they would lock him away. But, he is rich and he is a member in good standing of the Progressive faith. His fanaticism is therefore seen as a sign of his virtue.Again, that is how religions work. it’s about belief, not facts and logic.

Mr. Bloomberg was introspective as he spoke, and seemed both restless and wistful. When he sat down for the interview, it was a few days before his 50th college reunion. His mortality has started dawning on him, at 72. And he admitted he was a bit taken aback by how many of his former classmates had been appearing in the “in memoriam” pages of his school newsletter.

But if he senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a Judgment Day. Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

That sounds a lot like a religious crusade. The reason it sounds that was is it is a religious crusade. In a difference age, Bloomberg would be wearing a black hat and reading the Torah all day. In a different place, he is a Zionist agitating for Israel. In a different America, most Progressive are Congregationalists or our preaching the social gospel as  part of their reform movement. Maybe they were heading out to Utah as part of a Mormon sect. Progressivism is the religion of this age.

ID’ers Are Kooks

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The other day, the Spectator gave a platform to Stephen Meyer, the intelligent Design guru, so he could make his case. They gave John Derbyshire the chance to reply. Most people shrug off the intelligent design people, assuming they are just the creationists with a different line of attack. Therefore only believers bother to read the arguments put forth by people like Meyer. If you read what this guy has to say, it is not hard to come away thinking these people are worse than creationists.

When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss the many scientific difficulties facing contemporary versions of Darwin’s theory. Yet when scientists take up the public defense of Darwinism—in educational policy statements, textbooks, or public television documentaries—that candor often disappears behind a rhetorical curtain. “There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden,” says theoretical biologist Danny Hillis, adding that “there’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.”

The reticence that Darwin’s present day defenders feel about criticizing evolutionary theory would have likely made Charles Darwin uncomfortable. In the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it.

In the Origin, Darwin expressed a key doubt about the ability of his theory to explain one particular event in the history of life, an event known as the Cambrian explosion. I’ve recently written a book, Darwin’s Doubt, about this in which I argue that the problem Darwin identified not only remains to this day, but that it has grown up to illustrate a more fundamental conceptual difficulty than he could have understood—a problem for all of evolutionary biology that points to the need for an entirely different understanding of the origin of animal life on Earth.

An interesting thing about the intelligent design people is they have an authoritarian mindset that is revealed in their habit of relying on appeals to authority. On the one hand, they rely on the Bible as their ultimate source of authority. That makes sense, as they are believers. They assume, however, that evolutionary biologists also rely on an authority as their god. The ID’er turn Darwin into a shaman or prophet, who they seek to discredit, assuming that will discredit the theory for which is best known.

The trouble is evolutionary biologists do not worship Darwin and are more than willing to point out his shortcomings. It is how science works. It is what makes Darwin a scientist and not a philosopher. He readily acknowledged his own shortcomings and gaps in knowledge. Attacking Darwin to discredit evolution is like attacking Blaise Pascal to disprove probability theory. A whole lot of work and a whole lot of people have built on and modified what Darwin started. Darwin’s shortcomings, real or imagined, are irrelevant.

The real problem with the ID’er is this. Let’s say they are correct and evolutionary biology is a dead end and self-refuting at that dead end. Let’s say the math of genetic mutation is so improbable that it cannot possibly explain the diversity of life. How does that validate Intelligent Design? One has nothing to do with the other. Intelligent design is built on a collection of logical fallacies. To argue that natural selection is invalid proves intelligent design is correct is a version of the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

Of course, the motivation is the argument from adverse consequences. Their particular brand of Christianity requires a more literal interpretation of creation. God created the heavens and earth just as we see it today. Natural selection says the current natural world is the result of random selection, along with other things like sexual selection. Therefore, if natural selection is true that invalidates their religious beliefs. Since they are not abandoning those beliefs, they can never accept evolution.

That’s really the irritating thing about these people. They are not honest. John is correct to call them liars. On the one hand, they swear they are not starting from a religious angle and are scientists like everyone else. Unlike real scientists, however, they make no attempt to prove their claims or even offer up a shred of data in support of their claim. Instead it is a non-stop assault on “Darwinism” as they imagine it. It really is the opposite of science when you think of it. It’s also fundamentally dishonest.

The Death of Christianity in America

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Something I could not help but notice over the holidays is the near complete purging of Christ from Christmas. This has been a topic of debate for years now, but the steady retreat of Christianity from the public space is remarkable. Not too long ago, America had a president who was overtly Christian. He talked about Christ in public and regularly attended services. Within living memory, public figures would take time during Christmas to proclaim their faith and wish their fellow Christians Merry Christmas.

Today, we have mainstream news sites debating whether we should move Christmas to a weekend, rather than its traditional date. I had exactly zero cards this year with the word Christmas on them. Instead it was happy holidays, as if there were a variety of holidays from which to choose. When I said “Merry Christmas” to people, they looked at me like I was a heretic. Not everyone, some people brightened up and return the favor, but the fact is, the bad guys have won on the issue of Christmas.

According to Wikipedia, 43% of Americans attend church regularly. Without digging into the statistics, I would expect some large portion of the 57% to be “C&E” Christians. That is, people who attend at Christmas and Easter. That’s significant compared to other first world countries. France is at 12% and Canada are at 20%. These are two nations with historically high religiosity. Parts of central Europe have attendance rates in the single digits. In the West, Christianity is just about dead, but America remains a hold out.

The signs, however, point to that changing. One of those signs is the near perfect elimination of Christianity from Christmas now.  Within living memory a mainstream publication would have avoided publishing an article about moving Christmas. Today it gets a shrug. A lot of that has to do with the elites abandoning Christianity for multiculturalism and various Progressive fad. They have also decided that Christianity is for the bad people, so it has become a mark of goodness to not be a Christian.

The regional breakout on church attendance is interesting:

The lower rate of church attendance seems to correlate with the embrace of Progressive politics, but it also tracks with regionalism. At the bottom is the ancestral home of the American round heads, while the top is where we find the cavaliers. The one exception is Utah, which was founded by heretics from the old New England Protestantism. Even so, there are not a lot of Republican states in the bottom half of that chart.

There are exceptions, but those exceptions seem to be so-called battleground states like Florida. I cynical eye would say these states are slowly sinking into the same morass as the low-marriage, low church attendance states. In a decade they will go from states that trend against the Left to states that are reliably Left like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Every four years the non-liberals would get their hopes up and think they have a shot to win there, only to find out the Left rallied enough of their supporters  to carry the day.

Magical Thinking

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Karl Denniger is a good example of the wacky thinking we see in discussions about health and fitness in modern times. Denninger has posted at length about his conversion from fat out of shape guy to skinny less out of shape guy. He is a true believer when it comes to diet and exercise. He is also convinced the medical business is out to get him. He spends a lot of time railing about the corruption of the medical business. He makes good points about the financial aspects of the health system, but he tends toward the conspiratorial.

Regardless, the basis of the American health care system is that health outcomes are tied to morality. That is, you can control your health outcomes if you do the “right” things, which generally means aping the personal habits of our betters. Self-denial is a big part of the regime, so you need to suffer in the gym and avoid eating food you like. Being thin is better than being fat, because being thin is hard and often unpleasant. The “science” backing these claims is mostly just wishful thinking tarted up with factoids and assertions.

The truth is, genetics control most of your health outcomes. This fantastic blog entry by JayMan is a great example. Yes, smart people can improve the utility of their intelligence through education. Fast guys can get faster with training. Ussein Bolt spends a lot of time working on various aspects of his sprinting. He maintains a special diet and works his muscles in specific ways. None of it makes him a world class sprinter. He was born with it. His training and diet allow him to move from 1% to .0001% in the 100 meters.

For the rest of us, diet and exercise is not going to significantly alter your health. Yet, “medical science” insists having an egg for breakfast or a cheeseburger for lunch is going to kill you. They insist we go in for regular physicals, despite no evidence that prevention does a damned thing. Supplements are a billion dollar industry, even though 90% are nothing more than pica. Outside of the extremes, like drug taking and dangerous activities, behavior is not going to make much difference in your healthy and life span.

On the other hand, exercise and diet can mitigate some genetic issues. Avoiding tobacco, for example, is not going to lesson your odds of getting Alzheimer’s Disease if that runs in your family. It will lesson your odds of getting lung cancer, even if it runs in your family, but only by a very little. Just as physical training and education can only enhance (slightly) what your genetics afford, a healthy lifestyle can (slightly) benefit you over time. Again, it’s mostly about risk avoidance, rather than health promotion. Avoid danger is a good rule.

The question, of course, is the trade offs. If you like to get face down drunk once in a while, that’s fine as long as you do it in a safe place and avoid doing it every day. On the other hand, if you like wine with dinner, you’re not altering you health outcome one way or the other, so enjoy your wine and your dinner. Life is for living. You don’t get to start over if you sacrifice your enjoyment in this life. Even if you believe in the after life, no religion assumes God will judge you based on whether you denied yourself good food.

That’s probably why magical thinking about food is so pervasive. This natural urge used to be channeled into conventional religion. As Christianity has receded, people have found other ways to satisfy their need to belief in the magical. Instead of thinking a Christian life will lead to salvation, people now think hours at the gym will bring grace.Of course, magical thinking about food is as old as human civilization. It’s why Bronze Age cults like Judaism came equipped with an approved diet. People have always sacralized their food.

Religion & IQ

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For as long as I have been alive, the Left has been trying to “prove” they are the smartest kids in the room. One tactic is to attack religion and by extension the religious, who they naturally see as their enemy. This makes some sense, given that Progressivism is nothing but a poorly defined civic religion. Stuff like this is the sort of thing they like to wave around to prove they are super-smart.  I’ll assume the authors of this study are making a good faith effort, but 30-plus years of this act naturally makes me skeptical.

I’m not a particularly religious person so I don’t have a dog in the fight. I just think the Left’s war on Christianity is a lot like what we see in the Arab world. Islam, like all living religions, is intolerant of other religions. After all, if you are sure your faith is correct and others are in error, or worse, an offense to god, then how can you in good conscience tolerate these false religions? The answer is obvious, which is why all religions, with the exception of race-based faiths, always try to dominate other religions through proselytizing or worse.

Of course, Muslims really hate Jews, because Jews put a lot of effort into pitting one Muslim against another, as part of Israel’s survival strategy. American have been taught that Muslims hate Jews because Hitler, but that’s nonsense. Muslims don’t hate Jews on religious grounds or even geopolitical grounds. That’s part of it, but the real issue is that faithful Muslims believe in unity of the faithful. Therefore, they look at Israel’s geopolitical shenanigans as a war on Islam itself. For Muslims, hating Jews is self-defense.

Now, in the case of this study, assuming it is a serious effort at examining the issue, is they start with the assumption religion is strictly about the super natural. Even more specifically, they narrow religion to Christianity. It leaves out secular religions like Marxism and anti-religions like atheism. Both are mass movements that hold the same appeal for adherents. They trade their identity for that of the group. My bet is if we broadened the scope of religion to include secular faiths, the difference in IQ would be trivial.

I’m fond of pointing out that even the most brilliant people subscribe to magical thinking and superstition. Blaise Pascal, the father of probability, computer science and statistics was a heretical Catholic fanatic. Many of the men who worked on the Manhattan Project were religious Jews, as well as Marxists. J. B. S. Haldane was a communist, were many intellectuals of his day. Belief in the worker’s paradise is every bit as wacky as anything the Bible believing Christians can muster. Belief is not just about religion.

That said, Jason Richwine is probably right. Higher IQ could lead to greater skepticism and therefore lower religiosity. The reason is high intelligence often has a strange humbling effect. Once you get outside the normal range, the genuinely gifted can see the limits of human intelligence more clearly, as they tend to be in frustrating fields like math and science. That’s inevitably going to result a great deal of skepticism about everything, not just religion. IQ and skepticism are probably co-dependent cognitive traits.

A caveat to that would be people with an exceptional verbal IQ and average quantitative reasoning. That would explain the high number of Jewish communists, for example. A people bred for solving complex word games as a part of their status system are probably inclined to accept magic as within the domain of possible answers. People with high spatial, could also be an exception. In other words, the empirically minded will probably be the most skeptically minded, and therefore the least religions, with some exceptions.

None of this really matters much. Most people are not so smart as to fall beyond the line between belief and skepticism. That’s certainly true for the hooting fanatics of the Progressive cult, who fall for every nutty fad that springs from egalitarianism and the blank slate. it much more reasonable to believe a Jewish hippy was the son of God, than to think better pre-school is going to solve black crime. The Left still think you can talk people out of mental illness. To be on the Left means the total suspension of disbelief.