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>How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas?

Catholics used to attack Evangelicals. You see the Evangelicals had dangerous ideas that had to be eliminate lest the common folk would be lead astray.

People have always been afraid of ideas. This nonreligious religiosity is novel but we've seen this play before.

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Yeah but for me, and probably many other people, it really felt like we were just on the verge of moving past all that. Up until about, say, 5-10 years ago. Now it feels like we took a sharp turn off a cliff, into some kind of feverish madness.

I'd say so too. I somehow tuned out religious fear of ideas, perhaps because I didn't really think of those people as even pretending to pretending to be intellectually honest. But now non-religious people from my own generation and younger are behaving that way too. Even intelligent and supposedly non-nutty people like computer programmers.

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