"Religious people tend to be smarter"

[vorlon13]

Hell, the damn Mormons actually preach "The thinking has already been done" when they are announcing new and revised dogma. Not supposed to question, just hear and obey.

That's how they got away with having 6 different and inconsistent versions of Joe Smith's first angelic visitation. Tell everyone not to notice and the stoopid shits don't.

LDS is rough on apologists, they have to look in the 'sausage factory' and promulgate lies, it wears down the honest ones with functioning brain particles.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Several of the highest-IQ people on the planet are theists, something like 8 out of the top 10, if I recall correctly. That is, they have expressed agreement with the existence, or at least the tentative existence, of God. A couple are even outright Christians.

Clearly, there's no connection between "super-smart" and "comes to the right conclusion" (or the wrong one). One could easily say that an extremely high intelligence lends a susceptibility to religious-type thinking, unless insulated by skepticism at a very young age, because they are susceptible to a desire to fit in with "normals", early in life, and are more imaginative than an average person. The combination may well lead to a deep root of magical thinking, and this is made worse by the defensive mechanisms of the religious brain-virus (meme), which teach the person to segregate parts of their brain (cognitive dissonance) and to reject any kind of thought which might challenge the beliefs locked away in the segregated units, so to speak.

I have seen this phenomenon in my own father (Chemical/Nuclear Engineer w/ Master's in Process Engineering), who can literally list every heavy radioisotope's decay-chain, and can write by memory the equations for the rate of decay, but still thinks the world is 6000 years old. My fiancee will try to engage him on chemistry talks (since she's a Christian, which disarms the defenses he keeps up against me, but she's also a biochemist and evolutionist) to "run him into a wall of logic" which would force him to challenge those sequestered parts of his fundie brain, but you can almost hear the "pop" of the fuses when those parts start to come into contact, protecting him, and he'll immediately shut the conversation down.

[surreptitious57]

I find that I have less emotional attachment to factual knowledge as I get older. That is to say if something
is true I will accept it as such regardless of anything else. I put this down to the ageing process rather than
to being a sceptic or freethinker. I know that one day I am going to die. And so any attempt to interpret so
called reality is of no use after that point. That period between my non existence before I was born and my
death after I die is infinitesimally small compared to the age of the Universe. For even if I live to a hundred
it is nothing compared to nearly fourteen billion years. Since death is merely a state of non existence or non
consciousness it is no big deal. And this allows me not to take life too seriously here as I know that am only
passing through at the end of the day. So I try to avoid having fixed opinions on anything and seek to learn
instead. This makes me as free as it is possible to be while still being alive as for me it is about accepting so
called reality for what it is rather than trying to interpret it according to what ever I may think. And realising
that none of it matters in the grand scheme of things is the single greatest thing I have learned. And I value
it more than any facts I have been thought. That and the understanding that death is nothing to be afraid of

[Mudhammam]

Personally I wouldn't expect to see a meaningful difference between atheists and theists in overall intelligence.

Everyone who learns to survive in the world has at least part of their brain running like an atheist.

Well rob, not to pick another debate with a very formidable opponent such as yourself, but even microbes are pretty good at survival. 

[bennyboy]

Well rob, not to pick another debate with a very formidable opponent such as yourself, but even microbes are pretty good at survival. 

Yes, but they can't get each other to send money in the mail by dancing and shouting about Sky Daddy. So who's really smarter?

Nah. . . it's still the microbes.

[Minimalist]

The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes — that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects — this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once — and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
— H L Mencken (1930)

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.
— H L Mencken,

Scientists are human and subject to the same stockholm-syndrome religious abuse as run-of-the-mill theistic morons.  Time is solving the problem.

[robvalue]

Personally I wouldn't expect to see a meaningful difference between atheists and theists in overall intelligence.

Everyone who learns to survive in the world has at least part of their brain running like an atheist.

Well rob, not to pick another debate with a very formidable opponent such as yourself, but even microbes are pretty good at survival. 

Hehe, yeah, little buggers!

Thanks for the compliment

Come to think of it, my dog sort of acts like a fully fledged believer when we are out. She thinks she is totally untouchable and can't be harmed by anything. She thinks having daddy holding the lead is enough to always keep her safe.

Unlike God though, I actually do keep her safe. I save her life about 10-20 times on each walk by stopping her running straight in front of cars or starting fights with dogs much bigger than herself!

[ignoramus]

I would love to know if there are practicing psychologists or psychiatrists who are deeply Christian.
Would you go and get professional help from someone who regularly talks to an invisible thing up in the sky somewhere?

I'd probably offer to swap chairs with them...

[robvalue]

The psychologist I'm seeing is Buddhist, but she clearly doesn't take it very seriously and it hasn't affected my therapy at all.

I find it hard to imagine a deeply religious therapist being the slightest bit of help to me. But if they can somehow turn that part of their brain completely off, I suppose it's possible.

Mind you, a new age woo-fest would be just as bad. I don't want to hear about energy, spirits, souls, destiny, oneness and all that shite.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

The psychologist I'm seeing is Buddhist,

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but she clearly doesn't take it very seriously and it hasn't affected my therapy at all.

I find it hard to imagine a deeply religious therapist being the slightest bit of help to me. But if they can somehow turn that part of their brain completely off, I suppose it's possible.

Mind you, a new age woo-fest would be just as bad. I don't want to hear about energy, spirits, souls, destiny, oneness and all that shite.

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Buddhists and Taoists have always been, to me, the first major steps of mankind toward modern atheism. (They are godless religions, though some do get into the woo thinking quite a bit.) But technically they're branches of atheism, and proof that the "you atheists are all alike" is a lie. As we so often have to remind the fundies here, atheism only means "lack of belief in god(s)", and all manner of ideas can fit under the overall banner of atheism.