100% of Everything is Stupid

I suppose it comes back to Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is crap.

Including Sturgeon's Law.

Oh? 

Yes, because closer to 98% of everything is crap. 

Go on.

Strictly speaking, the figure -- the percentage of stupid -- is relative. 

For example, for a person with an IQ of 100, only half of everything is stupid. But just two standard deviations above the norm (130) renders 97.8% everything stupid. This is one reason why it is so easy for an intelligent person to be an atheist, because most everything, including religion, will seem stupid to him.

But atheism is stupid.

Correct. And only an imbecile would say that IQ is everything. Just as reason unaware of its limitations becomes irrational, intelligence unaware of other critical variables, modes, dimensions, and degrees of consciousness renders itself unintelligent.  

Moreover, "crap" is just worthless. What about an intelligence turned toward the diabolical?

I see what you mean. It's as if we need to supplement the standard Bell Curve with another one in a negative space, so to speak. 

Take an evil-doer with an above average IQ of, say, 130. Turned toward the diabolical end of things, we would say it is negative 130. Clearly, most of the real trouble in the world isn't caused by low IQ hordes but by high negative-IQ types. 

That is correct. Low IQ is self limiting. Unless those with greater intelligence decide to unleash it upon us. Not that the people who run the Democrat party are geniuses, but they are certainly more intelligent than the street criminals they are foisting on us. 

Say what you want about George Soros, he's clearly more intelligent than George Floyd or Alvin Bragg or Kim Foxx. Antifa only exists because more (negative) intelligent people want it to.

With this in mind, let's get back to yesterday's subject: why religion is so stupid. Thanks to Petey's unusually voluble insights, we see that it is no longer a mystery: any intelligent idiot can see it. 

But the same idiot cannot see, let alone comprehend, Aquinas, or Schuon, or Garrigou-Lagrange, or any number of similar luminaries.

It's very much as if the person who sees that 97.8% of everything is stupid, doesn't see the 2.2% that surpasses him. (And please don't take any of these numbers literally -- we're only using them for purposes of illustration & giggles.)

Now, God is not only infinitely intelligent, he is the very ground and possibility of both intelligence as such and of intelligibility. Therefore, if you're God -- assuming my math is correct -- then 100% of everything is stupid.

Recall Jesus' question, Why do you call me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. One could equally ask, Why do you call me intelligent? No one is intelligent but God. Same vis-a-vis beauty and any other transcendental.

Why do you call me evil? No one is evil but...

I see where you're going there, but Satan can't literally be "one," since he is the very anti-principle of division, scattering, entropy, and chaos. 

And if your other insights are correct, then Satan must have the highest negative IQ conceivable, even if one is silly enough to believe he doesn't literally exist. Principles are principles. We only dwell in them.

Now we're in a better position to revisit yesterday's subject of why exoteric religion can at times appear so stupid. The question is no longer, How can that be?, but How could it not be?  

And as I've said previously on many occasions, one of the surprises of my life has been that the intellectual depth is right there on the surface, hiding in plain sight.

In the past I've used the analogy of a hybrid SACD, in which the CD layer is on the surface, but the SACD layer is deeper. In order to access the latter -- which encodes exponentially more information -- you need an SACD player to shine the laser light another micron or so beneath the surface. 

Same with scripture. Obviously. For example, I just finished reading Dennis Prager's line-by-line exegesis of Deuteronomy, which follows his previous stabs at Genesis and Exodus. And he's just one person. Imagine all the previous brilliant interpreters.

Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax -- YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I'M LIVING IN THE FUCKING PAST!  

Speaking of which, I am told that the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 115, which is to say, a standard deviation above the norm. 

I took statistics back in the 1980s, but if I remember correctly, this would mean that 84% of these Jews have above average intelligence, and that if I were one of them I could figure out exactly what percentage of them has an IQ >130, but it's a lot.

Why then are so many of them Democrats? 

Prager actually addresses this in the book, but suffice it to say that they're as Jewish as fucking Tevye, only displacing certain religious categories and impulses to the secular dimension.  

So, what are you saying? When you turn progressive you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?

Don't ask me, I'm out of my depth. But maybe the higher IQ goes from positive to negative? 

Much of modern Jewish history is a history of Jews abandoning God, the Torah, and the covenant and replacing them with other gods, beliefs, and other "torahs." Whenever Jews did this... they created or joined new substitute religions: secular ones. 

Virtually every "-ism" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries was a substitute for biblical religion. And nearly every one of them -- Marxism, communism, secular humanism, socialism, among others -- was founded and/or disproportionately led by secular Jews or non-Jewish descendents of Jews who abandoned Judaism (Prager).

For example, remember that secular Jewish uncle of mine, the eminent University of Chicago historian? The brilliant relativist? Not only was he literally a red-diaper baby, but he never stopped being one.