2 grand is raised for a woman needing medical treatment and all Allen can do is to whine about perceived persecution of Christians, yada yada yada.

Oh, and for the record, Christians (and anyone else) don’t deserve any automatic respect for sticking to their beliefs unless those beliefs can be justified by reasoned argument.

On the other hand, people who give generously to a woman in need who they have never met, have earned my respect.

I hear ya. When you’re justified in demeaning people and condescending to them it’s just tough to know where to draw the line sometimes. They are Christians after all and not worthy of much respect. Being so stupid that they have a laughably inaccurate view of the world and are just too stubborn, and stupid, to abandon those beliefs when confronted with sneering derision.

I guess they’re just a cross that has to be borne.

But I sense an opportunity to do a little science.

Here’s the phenomenon that’s in need of an explanatory hypothesis: Putting aside the self-indulgent, not to mention way too convenient, assumption of intellectual defect what mechanism would explain fundamentalist Christian’s preference for biblical interpretation over the results of investigation? I assume that the obvious circularity of stupidity as an explanation for biblical belief and biblical belief as evidence of stupidity is sufficient to remove it from consideration? Good.

I’ll prime the pump with another, I feel, related phenomenon which I’ve come to refer too as the reverse Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. It posits that the mere consideration of the phenomenon previously described changes the observer. Specifically, it reduces the likelihood of finding yourself acting like a shmuck because of your intellectual superiority.