“This is how we should order our lives together,” he said. “And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards, and I am going to enforce my morality on you in as much as our morality is God’s morality.”
“You should always check yourselves,” he continued. “Do I believe what God believes? Am I defending what God says is good?”
“And if it is, then you should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.'”
Nonsense, nobody with the intelligence to start a church and convince people to join it, believes that kind of nonsense. It is LITERALLY like believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and INSISTING that our entire society should be configured to follow the rules that Santa Claus and/or the Easter Bunny demands. And who interprets those demands? Those same religious leaders. And surprise! Those demands include doing everything those leaders tell you to do without hesitation or question, and giving them as much money as you can possibly come up with.
It’s a scam, and they KNOW it’s a scam. NONE of them believe in God, or they would be absolutely certain that they are destined for Hell. Or maybe they do, and they know that since they’re going to Hell anyway, they might as well take advantage of the fun on Earth, before they go to their eternity of getting poked in the ass with a pitchfork, or whatever their weird cult believes.
I think it’s a mix, with overlap, and the ratios are tough to determine. Opportunists and believers align in stroking their egos and celebrating class or human exceptionalism. I imagine the tip-top of the pyramid consists primarily of opportunists, but I’d not be surprised if they’ve crafted their own batshit philosophies that justify their imagined superiority. The more dogmatic, rigid, and traditional ideas are reserved for the plebs.
Also, I don’t think that intelligence obviates belief/ego; in fact, I wager it can lead to an even more spurious web of justification, like epstein and the dark enlightenment bros. People are crazy and environmental chaos will amplify it.