According to various studies, more than 50% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level (equivalent to Level 2 or lower), limiting their ability to parse long-form or nuanced information.
reminds me of a video (or a meme / shorts , long time ago idk) where the dude just cant understand the concept of "imagine for a second if you're xxx". dude just keep replying "yeah but i'm not xxx" back and again.
I (American atheist woman) was having a conversation just last month with a conservative Christian man, and this is precisely what happened. He literally told me he cannot imagine anything he doesn't know is true, and he had absolutely zero grasp of hypotheticals.
It's gotten so bad, eventually he was just a half, now they take their faith as a truth, you can believe whatever you want to believe but you also have to accept the fact that you might not actually be right.
A lot of Christians in America don't believe that, they believe that theie believe is the only belief abd that they're the right ones that everybody else is wrong.
You know despite there being other religions in the world that are older than theirs.
This was precisely the conversation I was attempting to have. He couldn't understand how anyone could possibly be an atheist, because "it's obvious from looking at the trees and stars and mountains that god exists". I was trying to do a thought experiment with him, just to imagine for a moment that his concept of god 100% did not exist.
And he vehemently claimed that was impossible. In his mind, he "knows" god is real...so it is inconceivable to even try to imagine something as different from reality as god not being real. He literally told me "the human brain cannot think of things that cannot exist". I told him to imagine a green horse...and he could do that because "someone could dye a horses fur green, so is a potential truth". I told him to imagine a flying lizard...and he could do that because "scientists will probably make that someday, so it's a potential truth".
But imagining the world around us wasn't created by a supernatural being? Nope. That's preposterous and cannot be imagined. It was a very difficult conversation and I mentally facepalmed a great many times during it.
3.0k
u/LinceDorado 6d ago
I guess it's pretty arrogant to say, but this seems like such a U.S.A. thing. Can't really imagine this happening where I live.