[grapabo]

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The idea behind all of this of course is that any God who would send to hell pious, good people simply because they honestly believe that the Jesus story is a myth contradicts the idea of a just God.

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This misses the point. Under evangelical view of humanity, nobody is a "pious, good person" because we are all born into sin. They view the transaction of trading their life for the life of Christ living through them as a bargain that saves them from judgment for their wrongdoings, not something that they hold over nonbelievers as an instrument of superiority.

If you disagree with that and point out nonetheless that some people are pious and good, it necessarily implies that you are applying a moral standard of your own. Is this a road you're willing to go down? Because this puts you in the same company of the people you don't like.

The appeal of evangelical Christianity probably won't make sense to people who have had the resources to make amends for the things they have done wrong in their life. And it often happens that the people who have previously been able to make up for their wrongs don't figure out the lesson, and they end up, for lack of a better word, morally "stuck". This is something that happens so often in life, and the race to be righteous on one's own merits produces such weariness, that people will come to the realization that this race to maintain compliance with righteousness is futile. This is essentially the point of the Book of Romans, for one thing, as well as Jesus' repeated statements that he didn't come for the righteous, but for the lost.

Believe what you want, I don't really care. I'm an apostate myself. But your assertion that evangelical religious belief and intelligence are incompatible is as insulting as it is inaccurate.

Besides, math proficiency as the sole indicator of intelligence will only favor the trained chimps and Rain Man. If you want to show meaningful, creative intelligence, write a song or a poem that'll make someone change their view of the world around them. After all, it's the Liberal Arts graduates who really determine who's intelligent and who's not. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]