What things causes stupidity,ignorance?

[Kayenneh]

1. nah because you need to be educated to
know when to hit your enemy
where to hit your enemy
are you going to use a stick or not to hit your enemy,....

..or if there even is an enemy

2.Well the governments number one priority is to use idiots to achieve their own goals (USA,Islamic/musli countries,north korea,china,...the list goes on and on)

Ah, the wonderfulness of living in a country with merely 5,6 million people, we are not that ambitious nor do we have the manpower

[Confused Ape]

Fair enough Ape, but without knowledge one can rarely be wise.
So if Eve didn't eat of the fruit (I've gotten so much shit when I said apple, fundies don't like apples) she gained new knowledge, but didn't know what to do with it. God, being the merciful being he is, threw them out instead of teaching his children how to reason. Because that's what a good parent does.

It depends how the myth of the Garden Of Eden is viewed. Here is a Jungian interpretation.

In the beginning of many creation myths is an image of an original state of perfection, wholeness, and beatific containment.

These symbols express a paradisal state prior to any degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy. The Garden of Eden, and the Golden Age when mankind lived in union with the gods, partaking of divine fullness and totality, are other common motifs of this psychological condition. In the biological life of the individual this symbolism corresponds not only to the pre-natal gestation of the embryo in the mother's uterus, but to the state of the newborn's total dependence upon the mother. Psychologically, these symbols express the stage when the ego is only a potential, or when the ego is dominated by the universal instinctual patterns of human response to the world, or a condition when little or nothing of a uniquely personal value is expressed by the individual.

However, once the apple is eaten the world falls into opposites, and 'good' and 'evil' are assigned their place in the world. The Great Good Mother shows her dark aspect, the hateful or Terrible Mother, while the creative Father now sits opposite the Destructive Father, and brothers kill each other in the name of love, and the world is alternately either an enchanted or persecutory place.

Once Adam and Eve had the knowledge of good and evil there was no going back to that psychological state before things were divided up into good and evil. The Garden of Eden myth attempts to explain the expulsion from the Garden but it looks like dualistic thinking led to "Adam and Eve were thrown out because they did something bad."

God didn't abandon them in the Genesis myth. Before throwing them out of Eden -

21 And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.

He continued to talk to them when they were out in the 'grown up' world.

[fr0d0]

God, being the merciful being he is, threw them out instead of teaching his children how to reason.

The ability to reason and therefore choose was what he gave them. They chose pride (clothes) and disobedience over paradise.

So how's about we get naked? Or are you anti Paradise too Kaye? Hmmm? x

[Kayenneh]

Hah, I live in my paradise already (and since my paradise is winter, I prefer not to get naked. It's unhealthy)!

But if they had the ability to reason from the beginning, then a) why have the ability if you don't need it or have no knowledge or b) Adam and Eve were extremely stupid and were still not able to reason well

[fr0d0]

Practicalities must come first! We can get naked in the warm, that's quite OK!

Adam and Eve were extremely stupid and were still not able to reason well

Are you calling all atheists stupid?!

[Confused Ape]

But if they had the ability to reason from the beginning, then a) why have the ability if you don't need it or have no knowledge or b) Adam and Eve were extremely stupid and were still not able to reason well :P

That just about sums up humans as a species.

The Garden of Eden reminds me of the Golden Age myths.

The term Golden Age (Greek: Χρυσόν Γένος Chryson Genos) comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five (or more) Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and then the present (Iron), which is a period of decline. By extension "Golden Age" denotes a period of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity. During this age peace and harmony prevailed, humans did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance.

Hindu version.

Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.

Genesis again.

Genesis 1: 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food:

Hmmm. Humans invent agriculture - "This is better than having to wander around looking for food." Once the novelty wore off and humans realised agriculture was very hard work - "It was so much better long ago. Food was everywhere. Nobody had to work because they could just reach out and pick whatever they wanted from the trees." So, the hunter-gathering way of life became equated with all food being provided by mother when humans are babies and very young children.

[Angrboda]

Oh damn. And here I thought this was going to be an actual thread on the psychology of stupidity. D'oh!



For what it's worth, I don't cotton to these notions of the dualistic mind, but am too lazy to organize my thoughts and type a response.

At an interfaith discussion group I belong to, one of the discussions was around the meaning of the story of the fall. One of our members is a very fundamentalist Christian who insisted on spinning the story as a prefigurement of Christ combined with an existential drama. In his view, in the garden, mankind knew God in the immediate sense; there was no separation between them and God, so they lived 24/7 with the knowledge of God and his love. The story of the fall in his view is a metaphor for Adam and Eve choosing to "know the world" — to become acquainted with the world of the senses and concerns of reality. This move separated them from God, so that they could no longer "know Him" in the immediate knowing Him as knowing oneself way that they had enjoyed in paradise, and they essentially "left the Garden" by choosing to embrace the world as such.

I don't put much stock in it, but I had a different interpretation. To me, it seems that God set mankind up to fail in the garden, but that was the whole point. Prior to the fall, everything was perfect, they wanted not, and nothing they did was wrong. However, in this state, they would never experience failure, and never experience loss. One cannot recognize that one is free until one has seen that one's actions have consequences; you can't strive and experience the basic of choice, if you've no knowledge that you can fail, or that you can lose something. Adam and Eve would not truly touch their essential freedom, God's greatest gift to them, until they experienced failure and loss as a result of the choices they had made. The fall in the garden was God's plan to introduce them to their essential freedom, by letting them fail. In a sense, it was the existential version of pushing them out of the nest. So the fall wasn't intended as a punishment, the fall was God's way of teaching mankind of its essential freedom. The fall was God teaching man to fly.

Now I don't believe in the fall, of course, so my interpretation was just an excuse to go outside and stretch my neurons. However, the potential for radically divergent interpretations suggests that there are many interpretations which go undiscussed; and that the traditional polemics that is often used by secularists in discussing the fall is to take on the classical theological interpretations of the fall lock-stock-and-barrel, and only a select variety of them. When you get locked into one particular way of viewing the story, with a view toward attacking or defending the beliefs surrounding the story, it limits your vision.

[Kayenneh]

Are you calling all atheists stupid?!

Frodo sweetheart, I'm talking about God the Character, you know I don't believe in him, so anyone IRL who 'turns away' I consider smart for doing that. But if you ask me do I think all atheists are smart, I would have to answer no

[Phish]

Oh damn. And here I thought this was going to be an actual thread on the psychology of stupidity. D'oh!



For what it's worth, I don't cotton to these notions of the dualistic mind, but am too lazy to organize my thoughts and type a response.

At an interfaith discussion group I belong to, one of the discussions was around the meaning of the story of the fall. One of our members is a very fundamentalist Christian who insisted on spinning the story as a prefigurement of Christ combined with an existential drama. In his view, in the garden, mankind knew God in the immediate sense; there was no separation between them and God, so they lived 24/7 with the knowledge of God and his love. The story of the fall in his view is a metaphor for Adam and Eve choosing to "know the world" — to become acquainted with the world of the senses and concerns of reality. This move separated them from God, so that they could no longer "know Him" in the immediate knowing Him as knowing oneself way that they had enjoyed in paradise, and they essentially "left the Garden" by choosing to embrace the world as such.

I don't put much stock in it, but I had a different interpretation. To me, it seems that God set mankind up to fail in the garden, but that was the whole point. Prior to the fall, everything was perfect, they wanted not, and nothing they did was wrong. However, in this state, they would never experience failure, and never experience loss. One cannot recognize that one is free until one has seen that one's actions have consequences; you can't strive and experience the basic of choice, if you've no knowledge that you can fail, or that you can lose something. Adam and Eve would not truly touch their essential freedom, God's greatest gift to them, until they experienced failure and loss as a result of the choices they had made. The fall in the garden was God's plan to introduce them to their essential freedom, by letting them fail. In a sense, it was the existential version of pushing them out of the nest. So the fall wasn't intended as a punishment, the fall was God's way of teaching mankind of its essential freedom. The fall was God teaching man to fly.

Now I don't believe in the fall, of course, so my interpretation was just an excuse to go outside and stretch my neurons. However, the potential for radically divergent interpretations suggests that there are many interpretations which go undiscussed; and that the traditional polemics that is often used by secularists in discussing the fall is to take on the classical theological interpretations of the fall lock-stock-and-barrel, and only a select variety of them. When you get locked into one particular way of viewing the story, whether you're for or against it, it blinds you.

who said that we can only disguss this topic lets all discuss what causes idiotism as well

P.S: since when is fr0d0 an christian wasn't he a musli 5 months ago?

[Kayenneh]

P.S: since when is fr0d0 an christian wasn't he a musli 5 months ago?

Ahahahahahhaa!!

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Ehrm, I mean no, he has always been a Christian.

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