Too Intelligent To Love

I just cancelled my LinkedIn membership.  This is something I have been meaning to do for some time now.  I actually knew absolutely nothing about LinkedIn until an individual I have never met (and hope I never do meet) in person recommended me to LinkedIn.  He thought this would help me with my professional network, especially as an artist.  That was in 2007.  We met online while I was trying to expand my professional network as an artist.  Thanks to my efforts I landed two potential gigs in Costa Rica.  A woman with a bed and breakfast wanted to commission me for some paintings for her establishment in exchange for free room and board in her pension.  I eventually declined.  I had never met this person and besides, she was only offering me one month to do this which would not have been sufficient for completing there six paintings on demand.  Another individual, an American entrepreneur, also wanted me to do some paintings for him in another part of Costa Rica in exchange for free room and board.  This is the same fellow who introduced me to LinkedIn.  Because I didn't feel comfortable with the arrangement I turned him down as well which was just as well since, the following year, I already had saved enough money for a month's vacation in Costa Rica.

Now, seven years later, I have not made a single dime off my art through this virtual professional network.  To add insult to injury, this morning's missive from LinkedIn features yet another tiresome screed (or article) that triumphantly proclaims that atheists have higher IQ's than religious people (particularly Christians).

This really ripped it for me.  I went through the labyrinthine process and now I am no longer a member of LinkedIn.  You see, given that their methodology and statistics are not already skewed, this makes me a statistical oddity.  I have a higher than usual IQ (140, if you must know and actually I really don't give a shit) and I am a person of faith.  I am a Christian.  I attend an Anglican church.  I consider myself, before and above all, a disciple and follower and friend of Jesus Christ. 

Now I don't know what my faith in Christ has to do with my alleged intelligence, or vice-versa.  I really don't care.  I have had, and still have friends, Christians even, to whom being intelligent and having a high IQ seem to matter more than anything.  And I'm like WTF?  it's like the way my mother and teachers made a big deal of my being a gifted child and I really hated it.  It made it impossible to be normal or to have friends because there is nothing that children in the schoolyard are more suspicious of than anything unusual, especially if it can make them feel or look like inferior dummies.

I started my teenage years smoking pot, as though I intentionally wanted to lower my intelligence, then I had a meet up with Jesus and that kind of changed everything.  My Christian context, so to speak, was very anti higher education, and anything that was intellectual was held in high suspicion and contempt.  This worked for me because I wanted to be a happy zealous Jesus freak and that didn't require squat-all in the way of intelligence.  I have since come to value my gifts and in my often limited circumstances have been working hard at maintaining and developing them.

Working on my gifts by the way has done nothing to diminish my faith and much to enhance it.  However for me the critical question isn't how smart are we, but how much do we love.  People who measure intelligence (and human worth) are often loathe or simply unable to ask this question.  Our world has suffered plenty from our wealth of knowledge.  Knowing now the secrets of the atom we struggle with the nightmare of global nuclear annihilation.  It can also be argued that our high intelligence is also making it possible for us to harness renewable nonpolluting forms of energy: solar, wind, geo-thermal, tidal, to name a few.

All well and good.  I do hope and pray to the God that some of you don't believe in that we will also develop enough love and compassion so that we can completely give up those industries of death that are destroying the environment and threatening our future viability as a species.

There is a popular American cliché that says: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"  I will counter it with this: "Why do you consider yourself too intelligent to love?"