So, as you may have noticed I try to *work with what I am given* and I find that, inadvertently, you provide me with material to work with. So I try to take what I am given and work with it. Such is the case with the term *idiot*.
This for you is a very real term -- you actually do mean to say that those who do not and will not come under the influence of your (reductive) ideas and who, like you, abandon what I can call an *entire territory* of value & meaning -- are to be labeled by you as idiots. You mean mental deficient of course and lacking in some type of basic, computational intelligence that you favor to an extreme. To follow your reasoning is not hard. Your analysis is simple indeed. In fact it has hardly any moving parts. And in this, as I often point out, is its own deficiency.
There is an essay by Walter C. Parker called Teaching Against Idiocy that hits numerous notes that are easy to bring into this present *conversation*. Yet it must be stated up front that conversation with you must always appear in quotes because, as you must be aware (?) your purpose has nothing at all to do with exchange of viewpoint or of understanding, and your sole focus is to attack and tear down all that you have come to feel (intense) contempt for. You say "I'm really not that martial" and yet, if the truth is stated, you are highly and indeed exclusively martial and bent on war. And in your way of seeing things you have a valid justification since you are battling the *idiocy* you identify. So what I wish to express here, and it has run through everything I write, is that you are part of on-going cultural and intellectual militancy that is really very serious business. If you described your project in any other way I think it would be fair to say you are being dishonest.
Some quotes from Teaching Against Idiocy:
I think one of my larger arguments against *you-plural* is that I perceive you indeed as acting idiotically. I know that you conceive of yourself as acting out of higher reason but my assertion is that when one examines this one discovers, quite quickly in fact, that this is not at all the case. Your critiques are brutal (in the original sense of the word) and the parameters of your understanding excruciatingly limited. There is something deeply solipsistic in you and this is why I say you *write from your closet*. You have become exceedingly myopic -- militantly myopic -- that you have lost all insight into those things describable as 'common things' (κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων) because -- and this is my interpretation -- your hatred has intensified to the degree it blinds you. And for this reason I employ those two metaphors : one of Gloucester "I stumbled when I saw" and the other of Blake where a poignant contrast is drawn between seeing with the eye and seeing through the eye. Thus I say that you have no capacity to see through the eye. The entire idea is suspect since you have only the 'physical eye' as a reference-point. And my point is that everything of meaning & value depends, nearly absolutely, on seeing through the eye. So if Blake is right in any sense at all it could be fairly sugested, as a starting point of conversation, that you are believing a lie even as you really imagine you are positing 'truth'.Idiocy shares with idiom and idiosyncratic the root idios, which means private, separate, self-centered — selfish. “Idiotic” was in the Greek context a term of reproach. When a person’s behavior became idiotic — concerned myopically with private things and unmindful of common things — then the person was believed to be like a rudderless ship, without consequence save for the danger it posed to others. This meaning of idiocy achieves its force when contrasted with politēs (citizen) or public. Here we have a powerful opposition: the private individual versus the public citizen.
This is all of it a curious paradox.
But there are further dimensions here. That you end up creating conditions of rudderlessness (rudderless ship) which, from the perspective of those you hold in open contempt, pose a danger about which you choose, through an effort of will, to remain ignorant. Half of what I have written recently is about that. But it goes in one idiotic ear and out the other and indeed it cannot *register* in you at any level.
If I say that you seem 'illiterate' I do not mean that you have not come face-to-face with some books in your academic life -- you certainly have -- but I make the suggestion that you must never have read very well. I often refer to an Allen Ginsberg quote from the poem Howl : "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?" Ginsberg loved Blake of course and though I would not reference Ginsberg as a source of wisdom per se the quote has validity. How did it come about that entire realms of knowing and knowledge (epistemes) became for you darkened areas? What idiotic defect manifests in you that it seems to block out the sun?An idiot is one whose self-centeredness undermines his or her citizen identity, causing it to wither or never to take root in the first place. Private gain is the goal, and the community had better not get in the way. An idiot is suicidal in a certain way, definitely self-defeating, for the idiot does not know that privacy and individual autonomy are entirely dependent on the community. As Aristotle wrote, “Individuals are so many parts all equally depending on the whole which alone can bring self-sufficiency.” Idiots do not take part in public life; they do not have a public life. In this sense, idiots are immature in the most fundamental way. Their lives are out of balance, disoriented, untethered, and unrealized. Tragically, idiots have not yet met the challenge of “puberty,” which is the transition to public life.
This is where (to bend the meaning expressed in the quoted passage) you seem like an underdeveloped child. It is a metaphor so don't get bent out of shape Wee Willy. It is a way of saying that there is a dimension of perception that you have closed yourself off from. But there are many brilliant Englishmen who never did cut themselves off as you have done. No, they kept these channels so it never could be said about them that some monster "bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination".
So my suggestion -- and note that I continually turn the harsh lens of examination around and apply it to you -- is that your own willed idiocy be closer examined.
First, I fully admit that in the widest sense Christianity and Christians can definitely be critiqued. I am not at all closed to Nietzsche's points of critique in many areas. So what I say is that all of this are things that can be discussed. But I recognize a lower dimension of understanding and a higher level of understanding when it comes to the inner core of the Christian concepts. So it is quite fair to say there are many *morons* in our world who express themselves through their religious assertions (and who close many doors to other sorts of knowing) in a moronic fashion. Yet it is also entirely fair to say that there are very high-level Christians who reveal an entirely different sort of relationship. And that material as it were is found in the best of our traditions.Alexis de Tocqueville, writing 150 years before Mayor Kemmis, also described idiocy. All democratic peoples face a “dangerous passage” in their history, he wrote, when they “are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions they are about to obtain.” De Tocqueville's principle concern was that getting "carried away” causes citizens to lose the very freedom they are wanting so much to enjoy. “These people think they are following the principle of self-interest,” he continues, “but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very crude one; and the more they look after what they call their own business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.”
Just how do people remain their own masters? By maintaining the kind of community that secures their liberty. De Tocqueville’s singular contribution to our understanding of idiocy and citizenship is the notion that idiots are idiotic precisely because they are indifferent to the conditions and contexts of their own freedom. They fail to grasp the interdependence of liberty and community, privacy and puberty.
So I am interested in how it has come about that you have lost all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions you set about to obtain through your enormous rejectionism and negationism. In this sense you demonstrate the 'dangerous passage' that we face not insofar as you could have valid criticism of Christian religionists, but that you blindly tear at things you do not sufficiently understand. It is a classic error really. And I suggest it is a defining error that needs to be seen and better understood.
What did Tocqueville mean when he spoke of what can undermine or extinguish their liberty? Liberty in a (higher) Christian sense is a wide territory of concern. Idiotas like you, and idiotas also like Belinda (I am here employing your own term in a conscious reversal), have largely lost (or severed) the always recognized connection between inner, spiritual liberty and outer political liberty. This is a topic of real consequence today, yet it is not something that you talk about. I suspect you are unaware that when the conceptual path to the higher dimension of *the Christian possibility* is foiled that there are all sorts of ramifications and symptoms that become manifest. Thus 'remaining one's own master' is the topic and how one does this the subject of conversation.
So I could go on in this vein of course. I do what I can with what I am offered.
Clap Clap Clap 
