"College makes you stupid!"

[Archae]

"Only da Bibble makes yuz smarts like me!"

Christian Hate-Pastor Steven Anderson: “The Bible Makes You Smart. College Makes You Dumb”

February 16, 2017 by Hemant Mehta 173 Comments


It’s been a while since we checked in on Christian Hate-Pastor Steven Anderson, hasn’t it? No worries. He hasn’t missed a beat.

His latest rant is against college. Because college, he says, is for stupid people.

(The sermon clip is literally titled, “College Makes Women Stupid”… even though the actual clip applies to everyone.)

You know, what makes women stupid is college. Because college makes everybody stupid. Because fools — fools — say in their heart that there is no God. And it’s an atheistic fool system — it’s not a school system, it’s a fool system — that teaches Humanism and atheism and Agnosticism and godlessness and blasphemy against the Lord Jesus Christ.

…

You talk to some of the smartest people that you know, they’re people who know this book [holds up the Bible] really well…

…

The Bible makes you smart. College makes you dumb… you say, “I knew a smart guy who came out of college,” he came out of college smart in spite of college. He was already smart when he went in! And he was smart when he came out because he read books while he was in college. It’s not because he was sitting in college class. It’s because he read books! Because you know what makes you smart? Reading books!…


Anderson makes an unintentionally hilarious contradiction there. I actually agree with him that reading books makes you smarter and not everyone needs to go to college. The problem is that Anderson himself only ever promotes a single book.

Even if you wanted to become a Bible scholar, reading the Bible alone wouldn’t cut it. You need to read other perspectives and interpretations to make more sense of what it says. College helps you discover and debate those perspectives so you can really understand a subject in some depth.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/02/16/christian-hate-pastor-steven-anderson-the-bible-makes-you-smart-college-makes-you-dumb/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=BRSS&utm_campaign=Nonreligious&utm_content=361

[VMA131Marine]

1. This is not a new thing in religion

The RC church clung to a Latin liturgy for the longest time because most of the congregation didn’t understand it and thus needed the priest to interpret for them. I think it ultimately goes back to the story of Eve eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Some churches want their congregants to be dumb and unquestioning of church authority.

[ck4829]

2. "That's your education talking"

At some point during the discussion, they will say, “That’s your education talking,” derogatorily, as a general dismissal of everything I said. They truly believe this is a legitimate response, because to them education is not to be trusted. Education is the enemy of fundamentalism because fundamentalism, by its very nature, is not built on facts. The fundamentalists I grew up around aren’t anti-education. They want their kids to know how to read and write. They are against quality, in-depth, broad, specialized education. Learning is only valued up to a certain point. Once it reaches the level where what you learn contradicts doctrine and fundamentalist arguments, it becomes dangerous. I watched a lot of my fellow students who were smart, stop their education the day they graduated high school. For most of the young ladies, getting married and having kids was more important than continuing their learning. For many of the young men, getting a college education was seen as unnecessary and a waste of time. For the few who did go to college, what they learned was still filtered through their fundamentalist belief systems. If something they were taught didn’t support a preconception, it would be ignored and forgotten the second it was no longer needed to pass an exam.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/rural-america-understanding-isnt-problem

[Louis1895]

3. My Grandfather was a Southern Baptist Evangelical Preacher

His advice to me was "Don't get too much education. It will make you stupid!"

I loved the man dearly (and was named after him) but that did not stop me from getting a PhD in Biochemistry and becoming a professor in an Ivy League university.