Religion is intellectual cowardice disguised as wisdom—the refuge of minds too weak to confront reality without cosmic babysitters yet too arrogant to admit their ignorance. The religious believer represents peak midwit pathology: sophisticated enough to recognize life's fundamental meaninglessness and mortality's finality, but psychologically too fragile to accept these truths without retreating into elaborate fantasy systems about invisible sky parents who validate their existence. They've transcended the hunter-gatherer's honest relationship with uncertainty but lack the intellectual backbone to construct meaning through reason alone, instead demanding that the universe care about their personal comfort and provide them with eternal significance they haven't earned.

The religious mind exhibits the worst of both intellectual extremes—the simple person's gullibility combined with the sophisticated person's capacity for self-deception. These are people who can perform complex reasoning when it serves their predetermined conclusions but immediately abandon logical standards when confronted with evidence that threatens their psychological security blanket. They've weaponized intelligence in service of stupidity, using their cognitive abilities not to discover truth but to construct increasingly elaborate rationalizations for believing what they desperately need to be true. The religious believer is essentially a grown adult who still needs bedtime stories about cosmic justice and personal immortality, too emotionally stunted to find meaning in finite existence and too intellectually dishonest to admit they've chosen comforting lies over difficult truths. They represent the failure of human reason—smart enough to know better, too weak to do better.