What I'm trying to say is that they're not like this because they're religious. It's very very likely they're religious because they're like this.

I'm not convinced on the cause and effect here. I've met plenty of people who are science deniers, or at least those that vastly misunderstand science, and/or believe in this ridiculous nonsense that are not religious. Those people exist.

My strong opinion here is that people aren't this dumb because they're religious. They're religious because they're this dumb. The implication that religion is the root of the problem precludes the possibility that someone is a flat-earth/climate-denier/science-denier, without first believing in religion.... So every last one of those people must be religious.

By turning it around as I have, you can have people who are climate/science deniers, separate from their religion.

The side effect of this is that it places personal responsibility on those that would deny science (it's to tiring to type out all the denials these people have so I'm summarizing to just science from here on out). It's their own idiocy that causes them to deny science. That idiocy may also lead them to religion, but they're an idiot first. They weren't conditioned to be an idiot through indoctrination. By pinning everything on religious types, it implies they're indoctrinated by religion to deny science, which, that kind of indoctrination exists, but IMO, it's not the primary reason why people become science deniers.

They have a foundation of (or lack thereof) knowledge which may or may not lead them to religion, science (or the denial of it), or belief in any number of things that are wildly untrue.

IMO, these kinds of people are the kind that don't want to ask the hard questions, or strain their brain trying to make moral or ethical choices for themselves. They desire a voice, whether divine or otherwise, to essentially tell them what to think. They want the answers to the questions, without doing any work to derive what those answers might be, or put in the effort to figure out which of their derived potential answers may be correct. They lack the ability, motivation, or desire, to put in any mental effort with regards to the big issues.

Religion gives them a warm, soft, comforting blanket of answers to questions they couldn't even be bothered to think of. So many people who lack the intellectual capacity for critical thought, flock to it in droves. Same with most of the pseudo science bullshit conspiracy theories. Same with just about every consumer crap you can think of. A good example of this in consumerism is with Apple. I don't want to throw shade at Apple users, there's plenty of very smart people using apple products, but their marketing for the masses was on point. "It just works". And for the most part, they've dummy-proofed the shit out of everything they make. So much so that a lot of the remotely advanced, or customization options of most of what they do, is hidden behind layers of bullshit dialogs, or squirreled away in some obscure settings menu most people don't even know exists. They've used the same design language for years in their UI across all platforms, so anyone who learns it once, can use it across all platforms and devices. Yes, they've made improvements, mostly adding to the experience in a way that's mostly transparent to the overall design language.

Apple treats their primary customer base like toddlers. Giving them more of the same but better (somehow). There's a simple set of rules to follow that have been the same, at least in concept, since the 80's. 40 years of regurgitation of the same design, over, and over, again. Standardization to the point of being nauseating.

All of this shit from Apple is design to appeal to the lowest common denominator. If you know enough, you can get pretty advanced with it, but if you're intellectually stunted, you don't need to learn anything new to keep up with the latest and greatest products.

This is the kind of person that we're talking about. They want answers given to them without effort. They want to have others think for them. So when climate deniers make the case that they don't need to do anything differently, and all this science/climate doomerism is just FUD, they climb aboard, because doing the bad thing that they already know how to do, and change nothing, and being given permission to act like a complete fuckwad to the environment by some dickhead looking to make money, is a good enough reason for them to change nothing. Vehicles require gasoline. The furnace runs on fossil fuels, not any of this fancy heat pump bullshit (actually really great technology, but they think it's BS). Plastics make their lives easier and are easily recycled (ha. No), etc.... they want to maintain the status quo, and not think about all the horrible damage they've quite clearly and obviously caused.