Hello,
Thank you for sharing your ideas this thread. I lack the benefit of your experience and, as I was reading about your dorm conversation, I wondered how the discussants were defining ordinary and stupid?
(Post 47)
" The question that threw me for a loop came in a dorm discussion, proposed by an atheist student. He wanted to know why God created ordinary people, and stupid people?
You may note that the question of ordinariness, and simple lack of intelligence, is never addressed in apologetics books and themes. "
This caught my attention because so much educational work these days seeks to address the idea of multiple intelligences. With this in mind, ordinary and stupid become subjective designations; hence my request for clarification. Have the definitions accepted by your group held constant over time?
Thank you again for your insights.
JT,
There are things which can be well defined, and things which cannot. The terms “ordinary” and “stupid” are not allowed in politically correct academic thought, which is why American children are becoming so stupid that our high-tech industries need to import intelligent people from Pakistan and India, and outsource high tech jobs to Asian countries.
Nonetheless, if you’ve had to deal with a Pakistani tech-support person recently, you may have discovered that they are running low on intelligent people over there, too.
The dorm discussion referenced included no one who I currently know, so the term “my group” cannot apply to it. Except for the atheist who made the night interesting, the participants were young Christian men. We were discussing ideas, not definitions of commonly known words.
My definition of stupid means, roughly, people who score below 100 on IQ tests. Stupidity is a contextual evaluation. I was pretty good at learning science, but could manage no more than a C in college level American History. Later in life I dated a topless dancer who could not analyze her way out of a wet paper bag, yet who had received an A-average as a History graduate from the same school that I had attended.
Yet there was another difference between us. I managed to make a living in, and some contributions to the fields I’d chosen, despite only a B+ average. She never made a nickel in her chosen field and never rose above the level of artistic topless dancing. The real difference was that I could make a living while ugly, and keep working in my chosen profession after I’d put on twenty pounds of belly fat.
My definition of ordinary is, those who never challenge the garbage that they have been taught. Since every human being on this planet has been and is continually being taught false (garbage) information, ordinary people are easy to identify.
Find a crowd, or group, street protest, hip-hop dance, church sermon, member of a political party or any agreement group. Pick someone out of it. Ordinary, at least insofar as is reflected by their need to join that agreement system.
Stupid and ordinary are not terms that can be identified in academia, and that in the interest of self-protection will never be identified by academics. For example, consider the Three Stooges. Stupid? Well, yes, but every one of them probably made more money than you or I will. Why?
Not ordinary!
I walked to my 6:45am EE classes up a railroad track, and in the course of life worked both sides the tracks. Summer jobs were on construction crews, where, for example, the smartest guy I worked with was the end-loader operator, not the pinhead supervisor with his worthless Civil Engineering degree. Later I worked with Ph.D astronomers. 90% of them were the most dreadfully ordinary people one could meet, and 20% were downright stupid.
However, the astronomically stupid ones were also the most cunning— the ones most likely to find lucrative university or NASA positions. This points up the difficulty of measuring subjective terms. Hey, there’s a now-retired doctor who I math-tutored in high school, who could buy twenty of me with his family’s chump change. Who’s the smartest?"
You can get a good handle on “ordinary:” by watching TV commercials. There you will learn that people are programmed to purchase products by cartoon lizards, cartoon characters in general, cute little yapping mutts, glitz, noise, sex, phony promises of personal betterment, agreement with others, and above all, an incessant background of drumbeats, bad music, and repetitive jingles.
Most people are ordinary, irrespective of IQ. The voters who voted for their own personal bennies instead of the long term good of the nation are ordinary. The Republicans who put John McCain on the Republican ticket are ordinary, and the fools who put down Sarah Palin (who is genuinely extraordinary) are ordinary. Obama voters who bought into his smarmy slogans without paying attention to his history and background are ordinary. Prominent fools like Bill O’Reilly who refuse to look at evidence for B.O.'s true citizenship are the worst of the ordinary, because they pretend to be exceptional.
The truth is that only about 3% of the population is extra-ordinary. By that, I mean that they exhibit the ability to think outside the general agreements, irrespective of the topic. This is not a function of intelligence. Non-ordinariness is entirely a matter of personal integrity and courage, especially courage.
Above all it requires the courage to trust one’s own mind instead of the agreed upon dogmas, whether the dogma is that of some religion, Big Bang theory, Darwinism, or any group of people that you happen to be hanging out with at a given moment. Non-ordinariness is a narrow, thinly populated path, and if one chooses to walk it, first say good-bye to any friends.
