How much skill, talent, intelligence, and awareness people can show for their trade, their job, their hobbies, or sport. And such a thing is very common. Or at least that's my opinion.. I've had twenty different jobs in my life, and there are just so many people that are highly specialized with their own trade, really know what's going on and notice all these little details which would be lost on me at the point of entry. From this perspective, so many people really seem smart and skilled.
Really, people can be quite perceptive.
But when it comes to their personal life, to the big mysteries of life, the big questions, or philosophy, none of that intelligence translates, and can't be said to reflect how... wise, let's say, a person is.
I could just be motivated to say this to convince myself that I shouldn't be intimidated by people's skills shown in school, work, and recreation, but I think I can demonstrate very clearly that this is true using one example:
Here are some statistics on religion I quickly looked up:
Christianity | 2.2 billion |
Islam | 1.6 billion |
Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist | ≤1.1 billion |
Hinduism | 1 billion |
Chinese traditional religion | 394 million |
Buddhism | 376 million |
...And so on (statistics continue in smaller amounts)
The theology/ideology of these thought systems, (despite anyone's ideas of "coexistence"), is fundamentally divided. These are all (or mostly all) major life/universe views which cannot be reconciled with each other, when looked at for exactly what they are. So for any single one of these groups to be even generally correct, makes all the others wrong.
Even if we wanted to take the most popular group, Christianity, and say that it may be true, we have to account for different divisions within this group, as with all the others. That doesn't even leave a lot of people in the world who see the truth very clearly.
I suppose you can sort of take, perhaps, Buddhism and say that it could more or less be compatible with agnosticism or secular religions, but not much else. The best way I can see this, would be if all the agnostics and more generally nondescript spiritual groups (such as Buddhism, which does not necessarily require hardcore specific dogma) were correct.. which would give us maybe a Billion people or so, possibly.
But this still leaves billions of people that are just plain wrong. Think about that..
Lots of arguments can be made. People could say that people don't take their religion too seriously, it's just a cultural thing, a family thing, they haven't studied it, and so on.
But how much can a person be said to have figured out about these deep questions if they haven't even studied it? If they don't even care and just absent-mindedly accept a doctrine as specific as a particular human/s or demigods being a crucial part of a grand specific dogmatic theme, as with Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and so on?
It just goes to show the lost nature of humanity. That you can't just trust that people mostly know what they're doing, and have it generally figured out.
It's a massive trainwreck, it's utter chaos, is what it is! Figure it out solely alone, and don't let anyone intimidate you!
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