I didn’t say that religious people are less intelligent, I said that the Swedes (as do many people) consider that the more religious someone is, the less intelligent they are. That doesn’t mean that they are right. I would argue, however, that there is a vast amount of mindless sheep which follow religion (in the ranks), and that they, as a whole, are probably less intelligent than a group of people who have renounced the shackles of religion.
As to your father-in-law I think that it’s great that he gave clean water and modern conveniences to those who are less fortunate. I’m also sure that he is very smart, no one called him less intelligent because he is religious. As a Christian missionary, I do think that he was doing bad while doing good. Sorry – I think it’s despicable to help people as long as they have to take the poison with it.
I hope that some of the benefactors of his good work were just paying lip service to having his theology forced down their throats. When very poor people have to hear a sermon to have their free lunch, it does a disservice to the ideals of charity and good deads. When Bush won’t use federal money if there is any contraception or abortion in an organization, he is preaching his hate based religion along with the carrot of money for the poor.
It’s a sad world when religion is involved. Missionaries have been responsible for a lot of sadness and evil in this world. Read James Mitchner’s Hawaii – if you want an account of hypocrisy and evil in the name of religion.
Question for you CardiffBaseball? If he wasn’t allowed to preach his beliefs, would his group still have done the good works? Just wondering. To many people, spreading Christianity is not a good thing – it’s a reprehensible action taken by cult-like hypocrites.
Sorry – just my and many others opinion. By the way it’s hard to measure the good that missionaries do by helping people along with the bad they do by bringing foreign ideologies into native peoples own belief system. I think that religion is the dirty paste which gums up the positive potential of a society. If we didn’t have all these fantasy worshipers each absolutely sure of their own brand of fantasy, perhaps people would group together to help others instead of being afraid of them.
