To think that some people conflate being “intellectual” with rejecting anything spiritual?

[BothAndNotEitherOr]

I’ve noticed a pattern, especially in online spaces like this one, where people seem to tie their sense of intellect or rationality to a total disbelief in anything spiritual. It’s like the idea of fate, intuition, synchronicity or even a loose belief in “something more” gets lumped in with being irrational or uneducated. I’m not talking about organised religion necessarily, more the subtle stuff people feel or notice but can’t always explain.

And to be honest, a lot of the responses I’ve seen on here reinforce that vibe. If you say anything even slightly beyond logic or science, there’s an instant eye-roll or a wall of statistics.

AIBU to think that some people over-identify with being hyper-logical and that rejecting anything spiritual has become a kind of intellectual performance?

You may have misinterpreted that principle.
Quoting Google:

The statement "what cannot be disproven cannot be dismissed" is generally considered a logical fallacy or flawed reasoning in critical thinking and the scientific method. The prevailing philosophical principle, often known as Hitchens's Razor, asserts the opposite: "That which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence".

There is a major difference between proof of absence and the absence of proof

But then we must define where we drawer the line in looking for ‘proof of absence’ and how we go about obtaining such proof for something that is a made up story. To me, it is the same as looking for ‘proof of absence’ that Narnia doesn’t exist.

In the mathematically based sciences conjectures are made all the time. They keep that status until proven or refuted, either experimentally or mathematically.

Hitchens’ Razor seems to me basically to say that one is free not to attend to a concept if it cannot be proven real and one prefers to dismiss it. I can’t argue with him there, the Razor isn’t a terribly exciting concept IMO.

Why the need to lay down a standard for others? Sounds like the worst aspect of organised religion

Around where I am, and probably many other places, you get these champagne socialist types. Hipsters. The men are worst for what I am talking about. They're mostly white men.

They are atheists and they think anyone who isn't is a little bit stupid at least. Or not stupid so much as ignorant and uneducated. They pity how uninformed they are.

This comes across in how they interact with said people. They speak down to them, dismiss their experiences and perspectives and minimise their oppression by anyone outside of their community, so they won't see themselves as aggressors against this religious group. They see themselves as their saviours, if anything, because they want to rid the world of organised religion. But the chances of them interacting with a practicing religious woman in a way that develops a genuine friendship is slim to none. They have no respect for anyone who isn't an Athiest. They doubt they could be on their level from an intellectual standpoint.

What it really is about is ethnocentricity. They don't believe that people raised outside a Western culture can be very smart and the growing atheism in the West is correlated with how enlightened and intelligent we are compared to the rest of the world who are still bound by mythology. Thinking like this means that you can only ever see and think of others who are outside your Western Atheist culture as lesser. That will seep into how you behave towards said people.

You might not go around calling people racial slurs, but you will give less weight to the opinions and feelings of those you see as warped by their spirituality. It will influence how you interpret their behaviour and cause you to judge them more harshly than you would others.

Not at all. You need proofs to build an atomic bomb, but there is no proof, evidence or "facts" when it comes to morals/moral reasoning (ie if the bomb should be built, what to so with it once it is) most human thinking falls into this category

A conjecture is a statement that is believed to be true based on evidence but has not been formally proven. It's an educated guess that arises from observing patterns, not a random "what if" based on nothing in particular.

Science and spirituality do not go together.
Science fundamentally wipes the floor with any religious or spiritual element about the creation of earth and man.

I thinking taking people to task for their beliefs is fairly outrageous. It isn’t that long since the tables would have been turned and an atheist looked down upon in British society. Turnabout is no better

According to our limited perceptions. Many would make the same argument for a belief in a deity.

Really? Last time it checked it hasn't told us why we were created

No, it's told us we weren't created.

Some of the world’s mist eminent scientists take the opposite view, to the present day.

"This comes across in how they interact with said people. They speak down to them, dismiss their experiences and perspectives and minimise their oppression by anyone outside of their community"

Do you have any examples of the sort of situations where this actually arises? I'm not sure it is ethnicentricity when religious members of their own community would be treated the same surely

We don’t need to know why. We just need to know how.
There is no ‘why’ to everything. We didn’t get put here ‘for a reason’, it was just a series of events that allowed us to evolve.

Spiritual people always need a why. They need to know where we go when we die and they can’t accept that we just end. Like they can’t accept that we didn’t get created for some greater purpose, but simply because all the elements required for our existence happened to line up and so we began.

I was brought up in Catholicism and also am quite attracted to a bit of ‘woo’. My older female relatives read palms and tea leaves and I loved this. I’d love it to be true and can see some of the benefits for people actually. But I absolutely can’t bring myself to believe any of it, which is rather disappointing to me and a rejection of my own culture in some ways. So it very much isn’t a performative rejection, I just don’t believe it because it makes no sense.

Catholics reading tea leaves?...

Science can't provide evidence that we are not, so this is an article of faith you're attached to.

As other posters have said, we were not created.

But if you are talking about abiogenesis, then there are teams of folk working on that. It's just that it is pretty difficult to replicate the conditions, and more importantly, the time, in a lab.

We are not what?

I was just referring to your mention of ‘absence of proof’. Which can apply to anything really, not just god etc.

I think likelihood of believing in God is more down to upbringing and personality rather than intelligence. I know highly intelligent people (including scientists) who also have religious faith, and of course there are plenty of thick atheists in the world as well.

I also think on threads like this, there’s a tendency for non-believers to take quite a narrow view of what religion is and essentially talk about everyone with faith as if they were religious fundamentalists. The discussion above about creation is a good example.

I think your statement can also be the same for religious people’s attitude towards atheists tbh.

I had a close friendship with a muslim woman when I was younger and she told me off for wearing a bikini on a beach holiday.

Thanks for that reply, @Squishedpassenger. I think I know the kind of people you're describing, and recognise their attitude.

I disagree with the connections you're making to atheism or spiritual beliefs but, leaving that for now, let me tell you an episode that your post recalled:

A long time I ago, I was in the Amazon talking to a Yanomami spokesman. His people, he told me, were really frustrated with all the ethno-conservationists working to protect their habitat. They definitely did need the logging stopped, so were working politely with them - but they also wanted access to a clinic, a school, an office facility and some phones. He said there were mixed opinions on a grocery store (they could already buy packaged goods from a river service) but, by and large, they were pissed off that the conservationists wanted to deny them aspects of modernity that would improve their quality of life without materially changing it.

Talking to some of the campaign leaders later on, I tried discussing this. Their response was just as you described - more or less that the Yanomami themselves didn't know what was best for them. Not sure how this panned out; I think they did get satellite phones, a teacher and some medical services. I was quite shocked, though, by the overweening attitude of those men. They wanted to preserve the tribes in a prehistoric state and that was all that mattered.

Yeah - I can easily imagine men like that treating, say, a Native American shaman as a slightly pathetic curiosity!