This really got to me

[Astonished]

Someone please tell me I'm not deluded for thinking that religion genuinely decreases intelligence. Please. I'm willing to be a hypocrite and accept something that isn't true at this point as long as it keeps me from crying myself to sleep with how pathetic our species is capable of being.

This is one of the paradoxes of religion that believers just can't seem to explain so they shove it in a mental drawer and prefer not to talk about. So Christians for example say that God loves and wants us to know him and yet there is so much confusion and ambiguity about what the truth is. How is this explained? One of the ways certain Christians (mainly Calvinists) come to explain the confusion is predestination, stating that only those who were predestined to be saved will come to understand the true path, so God DID communicate clearly... but only to those he intended to save. And if you question the justice of predestination, they say "who are you to judge God!?"

Another way to explain it is that those who don't adopt the faith of the "true" sect or denomination have certain moral faults that prevent them from seeing the truth. Basically, you're too morally corrupted to perceive the clarity of God's message. How do you become un-corrupted? By adopting the very beliefs you can't understand the truth of in the first place. 

So does religion decrease intelligence? Well, I certainly think it constricts the mind. The etymology of the world religion literally means "to bind" it binds your worldview together. But to me it is binding in another sense, it binds people's minds and holds them in bondage from being able to learn things they wouldn't otherwise explore. There are very intelligent religious people, but I think the full potential of their intelligence is held back by religious thinking that is so often caused by emotional and psychological "hiccups" that keep such people stuck in the religious loop.

I kind of meant in the sense that if someone had an IQ score measured, being religiously indoctrinated would cause a gradual decrease in that until they emancipated themselves from it. But I get what you're saying, and regrettably religion does make a virtue of ignorance and not listening to reason.

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I'm always amazed that Christians that argue about preserving free will don't spontaneously combust from the cognitive dissonance.  There are dozens of instances in their holy book where god violates people's free will.

Back in the day he used to send bears to maul little children that mocked his prophets, but now that we have cameras and value empricial evidence he's suddenly concerned about free will.

And that's the other thing, it's impossible not have to subscribe to a myriad of cognitive dissonances by subscribing to religious superstition. Is it possible that it's not a terribly unhealthy thing to have that much of that kind of thing going on in one's brain?