“You originally said “person”. Angels, in heaven nor fallen, are persons.”
Still a stretch when the topic was people of the human persuasion.
“No. It is not obvious.”
Well, then, I must apologize for my lack of clarity.
“I am willing to stipulate that there are many who are quite intelligent, but are not wise.”
That’s one way to look at it. However, if their intelligence leads them to get almost everything wrong, is that really intelligence, or just a glib facility with language? True intelligence should lead one to the truth: if not in one’s youth, like Rush Limbaugh, then later, like David Horowitz.
G.K. Chesterton wrote that the purpose of an open mind was to close it, eventually, on the truth. This is something that RBG has failed to do, even at her advanced age, and with every possible advantage and opportunity. I know a number of people who thought their way out of the leftist swamp, but RBG doesn’t seem likely.
Is it really accurate to write that off to a lack of wisdom? That is central to her ability to perform her professional duties. Looks to me like a case of being a glib dumbass.
When one fails to achieve that which is absolutely essential to discharging his professional responsibilities, I think it is an unmistakable sign of insufficient intelligence.
“You are treading close to the the “No true Scotsman fallacy”
I’m not moving the goalposts; just clarifying what I initially meant. I recently read something by somebody famous, in which he deplored the fact that we must now make explicit what men of good will would take for granted.
Did you really think my remarks were meant to extend to spiritual beings such as Lucifer and the Triune God? Or to scientists who got a false reading because of faulty data input?
“I am unwilling to put RBG at the same level of intelligence as AOC, for instance.”
And yet they are wrong about the same things, and in the same way. Many people have created the illusion of intelligence, like the Bent One, with a good memory and the gift of gab. I don’t see any sign that RBG is more likely to reason her way to the truth than is AOC. A snowflake’s chance in Hell in both cases.
“Sin clouds the judgement, and with all of us, that cloud takes whatever level of intelligence we have, and makes it counterproductive.”
Mostly true, but that’s due to the corruption of intelligence. I was speaking of its presence or absence.
“I have also known “intelligent” lefties, who eventually stopped being lefties,”
The ability to think their way out of it almost certainly indicates intelligence.
“Perhaps my response implied more contention than I intended it to. This could be a by-product of exchanged posts rather than natural conversation, where inflection and tone, and clarification on the spot comes in handy.”
Could be, but I must confess: despite my best efforts, I’ve been pissing people off for pushing seventy years now. I had a habit of jumping from A to L to Z, expecting that people would take the rest as given. But noooooo...
This is starting to get unwieldy, but since you brought up Chesterton, I think we can both agree he was extremely intelligent. And yet, it took him decades to come to conclude and act on the conclusion to become Catholic. Robert Bork, another very intelligent man, took near the end of his life, having been an atheist. What if Bork died that 50? Or Chesterton at 30? Or (as you mentioned) David Horowitz at a younger age? They had to have been intelligent as grace builds on nature.
I don’t drop the supernatural, or other categories (like scientists) from my examples, because supernatural persons also have varying levels of intelligence, and intelligence exists outside of human beings and outside of limited realms. Ultimately, all the sciences, physical, philosophical, artistic are parts of a great Truth. Since you had made a universal statement, I thought it deserved the scrutiny of a Kantian approach as to whether it applied universally. If not, why not?
Ultimately, I suspect we are working under differing frameworks of what intelligence means in common use. I also suspect that neither of us are going to retreat from our understandings.
One other possibility is that some of the RBGs, and CERTAINLY some of the David Souters and Anthony Kennedys are intelligent enough to know they are spouting nonsense, and choose to lie. They are intelligent, but evil, and use their intelligence to obscure their evil. The sophists of Ancient Greece were certainly accused of that, but also the reductionist “great men” of the 19th century (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin) may fit that bill as well.