It occurred to me today that if I hear one more person reference God in a statement highlighting their own stupidity, I am going to lose my mind.

The county commission of Palm Beach County, Florida, a county that is currently one of many in the U.S. where coronavirus numbers are spiking, allowed earlier this week for people from the public to voice their opinions, before the commissioners voted on an ordinance to require wearing face masks in public, to try to help with disease transmission. If you haven’t seen the videos of the people who showed up to speak their minds, just Google “God’s wonderful breathing system” and you’ll get all of the information that you need about the incident.

It continually drives me crazy when people, who insist on being publicly idiotic, have to also reference themselves as people of faith. It makes the rest of us, who believe in God and use our heads and think before we talk, look like we belong to some goofy cult. It’s not just them, either. It’s people that I know, people that I go to church with. They are doing the same STUPID stuff. Not thinking about what they say. Not thinking about what they chose to believe in the media. Misrepresenting God and Christ by being dumb.

If you’ve read The Bible, you know that Jesus wasn’t dumb; he regularly butted heads with the religious leaders of His day, refuting their empty religiosity and making them look foolish. Not only was Jesus a thinker, He knew who to trust and of whom to be suspicious. I just don’t think that modern Christians who claim to follow God and Jesus have any right being willfully ignorant and/or publicly humiliating.

My real beef with these people is this: they’re giving the rest of us a bad name. Here’s how:

For about the last century and a half, the halls of higher academics in the world have been distancing themselves from faith and religion, a previously unprecedented move, since the history of intellectual pursuits world-wide have happened, hand in hand much of the time, with the church. And, this distancing has allowed for, at first, a dichotomy between the two worlds of thought, and then, later, an all-out war. Much of the current academic world would have you believe that people who believe in God are dumb.

But, of course, they’re not trying to convince me that I’m dumb, for that would be, well, dumb. Rather, they are trying to convince the unbelievers.

The world is watching, and it’s wondering about God and people who believe in God and whether or not the academic society, which would paint believers as unintelligent, is correct in their suggestions.

And then, you have all of these people running around being idiots and mentioning God in the same breath.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love these people, because as a Christian, they are my brothers and sisters in Christ –even when I’m not happy with them– but I also have problems with what they’re doing.

If you end up Googling “God’s wonderful breathing system” and you pull up an article on a website, scan the comments on the article. If you don’t find multiple comments in the comments section regarding people who believe in God and how dumb they are, I’ll take you out to dinner. The comments will say something like, “You’d expect this behavior from people who believe in fairy tales” or “They’ll be fine, they’ll just ask their God to save them” or “Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy aren’t real, either”.

So now, those of us who would tell someone that we believe in God, are faced with assumptions –stereotypes, really– about our low level of intelligence. These stereotypes get reinforced by every news story (don’t get me started on how the media works to make Christians look dumb) where someone is being dumb and mentioning their faith.

But, like all stereotypes that exist, they tend not to be true a lot of the time. Do you think that cops are power-hungry brutes? Most of them aren’t. Do you think that gay men are all effeminate? I know many that aren’t. Do you think southerners are racists? I know many who would disagree. These stereotypes exist, in large part, because it’s easier to believe in a stereotype than it is to go around and get to know people to discover that the stereotypes have a low percentage of accuracy.

Part of the problem I have with the “people of faith can’t be intelligent” stereotype is that, for those who believe it, they’re not likely to get near enough to a person of faith to discover that the stereotype is false, often out of fear that they might be thumped over the head with a Bible before too long.

Maybe, deep down inside, I’m just coming to terms with the idea that I belong to a group of people who are stereotyped, and that I don’t fit that stereotype.

If you are an unbeliever –> before you decide that you are going to believe the stereotype and assume that all people of faith are unintelligent, try talking with one or two of them. You could reach out to me, if you’d like, to ask some questions about faith and belief and intelligence, and I’d be happy to do my best to illustrate to you that people of faith aren’t necessarily childish unintelligent mopes who don’t have anything better to do than to believe in fairy tales. Some of the most intelligent people I know believe in God and Jesus.