Every once in a while, I hear someone off-handedly making a disparaging comment, referring to someone who seems to behave stupidly as a ‘cave man’. It regularly comes up in a heated debate between believers and non-believers, when the non-believer, losing their cool, tells the religious person she is a ‘bronze age person’.

In this context, the intention is clear: the atheist believes the other person to be stupid, hence the bronze age epithet. However, I think that is phenomenally unjust – to the bronze age people. People at that time were as intelligent and smart as we were today. They lacked knowledge, so some of the things they did may seem stupid to us, but were actually results of brilliant reasoning. If you somehow could time-travel a toddler from 12’000 years ago into present day, and she then grew up with modern kids, you wouldn’t be able to a difference between the teen- and the stone-ager.

What infuriates the atheist to the point they resort to ad-hominems is that in stark contrast to the people who lived twelve thousand years ago, modern people have access to knowledge. Religious people choose to be ignorant; some of their actions are willfully stupid. Calling them cave-men is a complete uncalled-for insult to the memory of those brave hunter-gatherers.