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according to our normal usage of the term, behave like half-wits and crooks, I remain convinced that, as Huxley and, I believe, Bergson before him, suggested, the brain is actually a reducing valve for survival in time. Some of the worst people I have come across, quite blind and palpably evil, have had oustanding academic accreditations, while some of the nicest people have been as daft as a brush (particularly, politically, as might be expected, but seldom is, to our invariably puzzled disappointment!). For high-IQ, high achievers, we need look no further than the Neocon cabal. Though, of course, if you wanted to, there's always my staple paragon, Mengele. True intelligence, basing itself on wisdom/compassion, is a matter of our assumptions, which are, in fact, our life's work. Who, with an ounce of sense, ever stopped learning, most notably about good and evil, but really, across the board?
It also, imo, applies to taste. A lot of the nicest, kindest, most unselfish people are shockers for kitsch! And "good taste", of course, is no guarantee of human decency, either. In the wealthiest, upper reaches of society, the Fine Arts seem to be all but mistaken for a religion; whereas it seems to me that it's their way of saying - also with regard to their charity balls, maybe -"See! I may be obscenely rich in an ocean of economic poverty, but I'm a sensitive, even religious soul, or I wouldn't appreciate such beautiful things." But as my own Judaeo-Christian faith indicates, moral beauty is as high above physical beauty as the heavens are above the earth. Fortunately, there is no socio-economic group that doesn't have outstandingly good people, and for that matter outstandingly bad. But we have to generalise to some extent to make sense of the world.
Your experience with hallucinogens seems to me to confirm the truth of something I read a long time ago relating to the topic of drug-taking, to the effect that young people were trying to get Heaven into their heads, instead of their heads into Heaven. It can't work that way. On the other hand, I think all human-beings who ever think about such matters, have an instinctive understanding that if they are given mystical experiences, there will be a heavy personal price to pay for them, because they are only given them in order to strengthen them for such trials. And religion, itself, after all, is not a matter of conscious credence, still less of credulity, but a matter of personal commitment to compassion. And people understand that and baulk at external constraints. After all, many non-cradle Catholics, imo, understandably baulk at the kind of Pauline, literally parochial ethos of the traditional Christian Church, prefering Christ's own teachings, which are for all time and all situations. Imo that is healthy. Not that Christians are obliged by their faith to go to a particular parish church. Or indeed that I want to disrespect that great Apostle.
Remember, Christ commended people for their faith in him, because they believed him, though he was an impoverished, itinerant preacher "with nowhere to lay his head", whom the powerful theocratic Establishment religious had outlawed, and threatened the same to any people who "followed" him. Of course, many, many ostensibly ordinary people make heroic commitments in their lives from pure compassion, who don't consider themselves religious - at least in any formal sense. But I'm digressing. (Don't I always?)
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