first of all, my respectful thanks, for your intelligence, and for your lucid but vague critique. im lucid but vague myself at times,. but in that department, if im dr vague jeckle- kettle then your mr vague hyde - pot. tortured enough analogy ? . but here im not trying to evade challenge, im begging for it. i thought it was obvious that the 2nd half 800 lb gorrilla i speak of is the whole black "civil rights" movement, whose wheels fell off when it became the black power movement in the times of h rap brown and stokley carmicheal. and then their rhetoric, not coincidently, became punctuated by rioting, looting, and murder whenever they felt that the political or public dole payoffs were lagging, or they needed some emotional but distorted red herring to prop up their own needs as power brokers to make felt noise. is that any clearer?

@racocn8 ----------and yes i understand your well coined phrase "ugly blinder" and your point about it. just have no time to address it now.

@holdenc98 The problem with the study above is that correlation rarely tells you anything about causation, and causation may come from somewhere else anyway. Does belief hobble functional thinking and thus handicap those countries? Probably. But religious countries are not subject to external discrimination, and cannot point to unfair treatment by external entities.

In some similar way, do women or non-whites suffer from self-imposed degradation or is it imposed from outside? Here, both are evident. Women and non-whites are subject to prejudicial treatment, but also suffer from self-imposed handicaps. Women also have intrinsic biological handicaps.

A society should strive to treat people equally and fairly, and that does mean mitigating biases held over from less civilized times.

However, these mitigation efforts are necessarily demoralized where women and non-whites censor valid criticism, and compel society to wear ugly blinders that compel politically correctness and omission of criticism. As example, far too many women bury themselves in their sexually oriented roles and overdo the time spent on clothing and appearance. Too many non-whites remain fully devoted to their religions and refuse to abandon unhealthy eating habits. Thus, the complaints of women and non-whites lose their strength when they have so much work to do themselves.

It’s in the Bible, it must be true!

@Canndue Absolutely. I see talking donkeys everyday and entire cities falling down just by marching around it 7 times beating a drum

Trigger word,oh, there's grace. If God were real I'd remove the c and it would arrange Rage. Chaotic Bipolar rage.

I know some very intelligent religious people. I never understood it. Maybe they are brilliant at using what they were taught, but never taught how to think?

@Canndue I think they just stuff the religious bits into the part of their brains for things they don't intend to examine too closely.

@alewife336 it’s like they go brain dead, one minute they explaining quantum physics, and next they are goo-goo over talking snakes...

@Canndue Brain dead, yes. Goo-goo over talking snakes, yes. But please don’t cite quantum physics in this context.

When people say they are quantum physicists, I think of mathematicians who value elegant equations more highly than they value empirical evidence.

@yvilletom I agree Tom.