I would gather that a shaved Jesus may reflect a popular embodiment of a long held inner image of self perfection, unobtainable to most, which also promotes the god side of Jesus as man/god.

Right.

That is indeed the same explanation: the choice simply reflects the cultural happenstance of current beauty standards. Jesus is shaved because to be otherwise would be unattractive and Jesus is supposed to be perfect. This was not the view of the early Christians, who appear to have regarded Jesus as ugly, probably because they believed scripture said so, and because it fit the theology of his humbling himself when incarnate, though it also fit ancient counter-culture hero aesthetics: which is why the Gospel Jesus weirdly matches the entire mythotype of both Socrates and Aesop, famous “ugly heroes” who dominated through wisdom and wit rather than physical excellence (OHJ, Element 46, Ch. 5).

“It is a machine for generating delusional people and the grifters who profit off them.”

A better description I have not seen.

Thanks for your responses. I can see the environmental factor as primary influence (especially with your IQ, RQ, KQ, WQ explanation.)

As for shaved Jesus I’d say an art historian could explain it through cultural styles based on period, but I think you’re selling yourself short. Images are “accepted” by populations because they approve of what is being presented. You pointed out that aspects of a religion change as people/cultures change (“Jesus now embodies these aspects because random religious people embody the same aspects.”) My quotations.

Hence, white and gun toting Jesus.

I would gather that a shaved Jesus may reflect a popular embodiment of a long held inner image of self perfection, unobtainable to most, which also promotes the god side of Jesus as man/god.

Thanks again.

“Ripped like Jesus” was a phrase I heard at a gym I used to go to. Lol

A false dichotomy is a violation of the Law of Excluded Middle (a dichotomy must exclude all middle options).

“He [Wood] has irrationally assumed the only options are Intellgent Creator or Absolutely Nothing. Which is a violation of the Law of Excluded Middle and thus a rudimentary mistake of logic”.

This isn’t a violation of the Law of Excluded Middle. It’s more like a misapplication of it. His inference is a false dichotomy, which is fallacious. So, “(…) Which is a false dichotomy and thus a rudimentary mistake of logic” is more accurate.

P.S. Note that twin studies suggest there is no genetic determinant of religiosity. Environmental factors have near perfect correlation instead.

Even studies finding weak correlations (where twins raised differently are “slightly” more likely to follow similar religious paths) don’t align cross-culturally (the percentage of twins who are religious varies by culture), indicating that if any genetic factors exist, they are second order, and thus environment matters far more (it provides the available gradients and encouragements).

Note everything is manifest physically in the brain. So “we see it in the brain” is meaningless (it tells us nothing about how the brain got that way).

So I think you mean, “Is it genetic?”

I am not aware of any evidence that it is. The evidence tends to indicate it is environmental (a function of what environment you grow up in, i.e. how and where you were raised and what happened to you in childhood, or the happenstance gradient of your subsequent life path, i.e. whether you get “captured” by a delusional social group). Because people shift position a lot based on those factors, which means genes cannot be much in control of the outcome.

There can be, however, second order genetic factors.

For example, “ambiguity intolerance” seems to be substantially genetic (albeit not perfectly; ambiguity tolerance or intolerance can, to an extent, change with habituation and learning, so is partially environmental). And “ambiguity intolerance” is a cognitive bias that tends to funnel people into conservative ideologies, which tend to be religious. But that’s a lot of steps of causation, and each step lacks a perfect correlation (there are atheist conservatives; there are nonconservative ambiguity intolerators; the liberal religious can have high ambiguity tolerance; etc.).

So I think it really comes down to (a) parenting and (b) primary schooling. When those lack strong influences toward critical thinking and rationality (not just the skills being taught, but being valorized, prioritized, and encouraged), people will “drift” on whatever cultural wind emotionally catches them. Which depends in part on which winds are even available (e.g. if you suppress or vilify or otherwise socially punish nonbelief, more people will become religious for lack of gradients to choose). This is why America remains so much more conservatively religious than Europe: it is a happenstance of the social system we built. It is a machine for generating delusional people and the grifters who profit on them.

(As for why Western depictions of Jesus have him totally shaved, you’d have to ask an art historian. It’s obviously a cultural issue, just like having Jesus be consistently “white” and “handsome” and even beardless, even though ancient lore was exactly the contrary.)

Note there are confusions here that we should not be perpetuating.

First, the correlation between intelligence and religion is actually weak. It has too many outliers to be a relevant observation. In fact, it has too many strong outliers. So I think it’s just an incidental artifact of access to information being lower among slightly more lower IQ persons than higher IQ persons. So what is being measured are lazy followers, not thought leaders, i.e. Christian apologists don’t have low IQs, they tend to have high IQs, as with most delusional intellectual participants (as opposed to quiet sideliners), because intelligence makes it easier to rationalize a false belief.

Second, intelligence (IQ) is not the same thing as rationality (RQ), and that’s not the same thing as knowledge (KQ), and that’s not the same thing as wisdom (WQ).

IQ only measures problem-solving capacity; it does not measure rationality (solving problems with the particular goal of reliably purging false beliefs). Rationality is only a learned skill, and even when learned, has to actually be consistently applied (so even people with the skill can fail at it if they choose not to use it in a particular subject, like religion—as will happen when they are delusional or have a specific grift to pull). I do suspect the correlation between low RQ and religion will be steeper than for IQ; but it will still have outliers, because the delusional and the grifters can have and apply the skill on a mere test of it, while dropping it when testing the false beliefs they are emotionally committed to.

Likewise, knowledge means simply a database of information. A low IQ or RQ person can be extremely erudite. But a lot of error results from ignorance rather than failures of reason, i.e., simply not knowing things. And increasing knowledge does have an effect (as it will cause more and more people to apply IQ and RQ to escaping false beliefs), which we see in the effect college has on religious belief. Again, not a perfect correlation, but more substantive than for IQ. Combine high RQ with high KQ and the correlation will be even steeper. This is where IQ becomes an artifact. IQ makes it easier to boost KQ; and therefore, conversely, low IQ persons will tend more often to suffer low KQ and RQ, but not in perfect correlation. IQ itself is thus irrelevant; it never directly contributes to religious belief status. It only affects the signals of RQ and KQ which are the actual things affecting religious belief status.

Finally, knowledge, rationality, and intelligence are not wisdom. Wisdom (WQ) is when you have applied those three things enough to have correctly figured out how the world actually works, how people actually work, how you yourself actually work. Measuring this requires knowing what it is, which is precisely the point of disagreement between the religious and the nonreligious. So it simply becomes tautological that high WQ people will be atheists (and in particular some variety of secular humanist). And the religious will insist it’s the other way around. Which requires us to roll up our sleeves and demonstrate which by an analysis of which side is being reliably rational and informed, and which not. Which will dictate which side is chasing WQ.

There is also the matter of EQ (emotional intelligence), though that has less to do with belief formation and more to do with the ability to read and work with others, and to evaluate and aid yourself with emotions. So I doubt it has any correlation with religion (except possibly on the liberal/conservative spectrum, i.e. I expect more high EQ people in liberal than in conservative religions and sects, and I expect the outliers, the high EQ conservatives, to be thought leaders, i.e. manipulators and profit rakers, more often than chance predicts).

.

“The present article addresses how people mentally conceptualize the relationship between science and religion and how these conceptualizations can be systematized.” –Zein, R. A., Altenmüller, M. S., & Gollwitzer, M. (2024). “Longtime nemeses or cordial allies? How individuals mentally relate science and religion.” Psychological Review, 131(6), 1459–1481. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000492

“I will argue that this new hypothesis is also capable of explaining the negative correlation between intelligence and belief, as well as at least part of the decline of religious belief and the growth of atheism over the same historical period.”
–Cheyne, James Allan. “Atheism rising: the connection between intelligence, science, and the decline of belief.” Skeptic [Altadena, CA], vol. 15, no. 2, summer 2009, pp. 33+. Gale Academic OneFile.