"Highly Educated Forms of Stupidity"

Last week I found a great article by J. Budziszewski, a philosophy professor at University of Texas, Austin.  It describes his conversion experience, and is titled "Escape from Nihilism".

I was going to post a longer section, but the article is so great that I thought I'd just post this small snippet, and point to the whole article here for the rest.

[A] strong mind that refuses the call to serve the God who made it has its own way of going wrong. When some people run away from God, they rob and kill. When other people go away from God, they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When still other people run away from God, they just sleep their lives away.

Well, when I fled from God, I didn’t do any of those things. My way of running away from God was to get stupid. I am very serious. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that you have to be highly educated and intelligent to commit, and I discovered them all.

God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride.

- J. Budziszewski, in Escape from Nihilism [source]