Atheists are more intelligent than religious people, say researchers

[phands]

Have all those highly intelligent atheists worked out why it is that religiosity confers an evolutionary survival advantage and greater statistical longevity?

You mentioned evolution. Don't use words you (clearly) don't understand. Per your own shitty bible, xtians are allowed to kill atheists, which still happens in many parts of the world, because <gawd>.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Intelligence can be measured/defined in various ways, buttttttt, I think the instinct to evaluate each & every orthodoxy that claims our attention is a key facet of intelligence (or rationality or critical thinking.) Doubt is a higher function.

 

[steve_bank]

Have all those highly intelligent atheists worked out why it is that religiosity confers an evolutionary survival advantage and greater statistical longevity?

Intelligent theists
A long history of conflict, death, and destruction. In a sense I agree religion provided a social glue in times when syperstition and illiteracy was the norm. Most of the conflict today is religious.

Back in the 60s/70s there was a saying 'kill a commie for Christ'. I was never pro communist quite the opposite and thought destroying the Soviet system was crucial, but kill a commie for Christ represents the moarly twisted Christianity.

We would have been better of with Greek mythology.

 

[Politesse]

Have all those highly intelligent atheists worked out why it is that religiosity confers an evolutionary survival advantage and greater statistical longevity?

Intelligent theists
A long history of conflict, death, and destruction. In a sense I agree religion provided a social glue in times when syperstition and illiteracy was the norm. Most of the conflict today is religious.

Back in the 60s/70s there was a saying 'kill a commie for Christ'. I was never pro communist quite the opposite and thought destroying the Soviet system was crucial, but kill a commie for Christ represents the moarly twisted Christianity.

We would have been better of with Greek mythology.

Because.... the Greeks were.... pacifists?

 

[steve_bank]

Have all those highly intelligent atheists worked out why it is that religiosity confers an evolutionary survival advantage and greater statistical longevity?

Intelligent theists
A long history of conflict, death, and destruction. In a sense I agree religion provided a social glue in times when syperstition and illiteracy was the norm. Most of the conflict today is religious.

Back in the 60s/70s there was a saying 'kill a commie for Christ'. I was never pro communist quite the opposite and thought destroying the Soviet system was crucial, but kill a commie for Christ represents the moarly twisted Christianity.

We would have been better of with Greek mythology.

Because.... the Greeks were.... pacifists?

Because they were not hung up on sex, obviously...

Did Greeks ever go to war in the name of a god, or say go to war because Zeus spoke to them? Greek mythology mixed with Freek logic would have been much less toxic.

 

[Politesse]

Because.... the Greeks were.... pacifists?

Because they were not hung up on sex, obviously...

Did Greeks ever go to war in the name of a god, or say go to war because Zeus spoke to them? Greek mythology mixed with Freek logic would have been much less toxic.

They never went to war without the consent of the gods. Whether or not the gods desired it was a critical element in any conciliar discussion of war, and in battle, divination of various kinds (usually haruspicy and ornithomancy) determined at regular intervals whether the gods were still on board, what formations and strategies should be used, when attacks or retreats should be called, etc. They strongly believed that the gods descended from Olympus to fight with them, and soldiers would testify to sightings of Ares, Athena Nike, or other deities during battles.

Did you ever read the Iliad??

I'll grant you the not-hung-up-on-sex part though.

 

[steve_bank]

Because.... the Greeks were.... pacifists?

Because they were not hung up on sex, obviously...

Did Greeks ever go to war in the name of a god, or say go to war because Zeus spoke to them? Greek mythology mixed with Freek logic would have been much less toxic.

They never went to war without the consent of the gods. Whether or not the gods desired it was a critical element in any conciliar discussion of war, and in battle, divination of various kinds (usually haruspicy and ornithomancy) determined at regular intervals whether the gods were still on board, what formations and strategies should be used, when attacks or retreats should be called, etc. They strongly believed that the gods descended from Olympus to fight with them, and soldiers would testify to sightings of Ares, Athena Nike, or other deities during battles.

Did you ever read the Iliad??

I'll grant you the not-hung-up-on-sex part though.

My read of Greek and Roman mythology as well is that people did not take them seriously, at least not like the absurd literal Christianity. Romans considered common religious ritual important to a functioning society.

Fo decades Monday Night Football became a weekly ritual for a great many. People talked about it at work. Our modern myths are Rambo, Rocky, and John Wayne's cowboy persona the rugged independent individual. Talking points of reference in culture. I expect in everyday life ancient Greek myths served the same purpose. Dimitri has been shot by Cupid's arrow. As strong as Hercules, a Herculean task.

I question whether the original Hebrew concept of god was literal.

Gods and lesser beings were all metaphor reflecting human behavior. Talking points for communication.

 

[Politesse]

They never went to war without the consent of the gods. Whether or not the gods desired it was a critical element in any conciliar discussion of war, and in battle, divination of various kinds (usually haruspicy and ornithomancy) determined at regular intervals whether the gods were still on board, what formations and strategies should be used, when attacks or retreats should be called, etc. They strongly believed that the gods descended from Olympus to fight with them, and soldiers would testify to sightings of Ares, Athena Nike, or other deities during battles.

Did you ever read the Iliad??

I'll grant you the not-hung-up-on-sex part though.

My read of Greek and Roman mythology as well is that people did not take them seriously, at least not like the absurd literal Christianity. Romans considered common religious ritual important to a functioning society.

Fo decades Monday Night Football became a weekly ritual for a great many. People talked about it at work. Our modern myths are Rambo, Rocky, and John Wayne's cowboy persona the rugged independent individual. Talking points of reference in culture. I expect in everyday life ancient Greek myths served the same purpose. Dimitri has been shot by Cupid's arrow. As strong as Hercules, a Herculean task.

I question whether the original Hebrew concept of god was literal.

Gods and lesser beings were all metaphor reflecting human behavior. Talking points for communication.

i would love to agree with you, since the views you attribute to the ancients sound a lot more like my own views on divinity than what usually gets trotted around as Christianity around here, and I am also a Pagan after all. Would not mind the august company of the sages of old. But I am not buying it. History is replete with examples of Greeks and Romans taking the involvement of the deities quite seriously indeed. They "spoke" with them regularly via divination, and decided the fates of men and nations on the results. The occasional ancient skeptic did not the norm make.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If religious people are less intelligent on average, then that is less reason to ridicule them, not more.

This is true. In a way it's like a tall basketball player making fun of short people.

The difference, however, is that many short people are running around telling everyone that they are taller, better basketball players when they're clearly not, and it is only these that deserve correction, and sometimes ridicule.

There is an obvious cognitive inequality.

 

[Keith&Co.]

If religious people are less intelligent on average, then that is less reason to ridicule them, not more.

This is true. In a way it's like a tall basketball player making fun of short people.

But short people aren't selectively short.
It's not like they're 6 foot 4 on any basketball court except the one at the Christain Youth Center, where they're 4 foot 6.

I don't taunt or tease people who are recognizably disabled, but then there is my family. People who are skeptical about every claim in a commercial, seek four opinions on the car they want to buy, research expert opinions on vacation spots, then bitch that 'evolution is only a theory,' or 'evolution is wrong because the big bang violates the law of thermdammics,' or 'atheists really believe in God, but Satan has convinced them that they don't.'

Those people, the ones who put ignorance on like a badge, those are fair game.

 

[steve_bank]

They never went to war without the consent of the gods. Whether or not the gods desired it was a critical element in any conciliar discussion of war, and in battle, divination of various kinds (usually haruspicy and ornithomancy) determined at regular intervals whether the gods were still on board, what formations and strategies should be used, when attacks or retreats should be called, etc. They strongly believed that the gods descended from Olympus to fight with them, and soldiers would testify to sightings of Ares, Athena Nike, or other deities during battles.

Did you ever read the Iliad??

I'll grant you the not-hung-up-on-sex part though.

My read of Greek and Roman mythology as well is that people did not take them seriously, at least not like the absurd literal Christianity. Romans considered common religious ritual important to a functioning society.

Fo decades Monday Night Football became a weekly ritual for a great many. People talked about it at work. Our modern myths are Rambo, Rocky, and John Wayne's cowboy persona the rugged independent individual. Talking points of reference in culture. I expect in everyday life ancient Greek myths served the same purpose. Dimitri has been shot by Cupid's arrow. As strong as Hercules, a Herculean task.

I question whether the original Hebrew concept of god was literal.

Gods and lesser beings were all metaphor reflecting human behavior. Talking points for communication.

i would love to agree with you, since the views you attribute to the ancients sound a lot more like my own views on divinity than what usually gets trotted around as Christianity around here, and I am also a Pagan after all. Would not mind the august company of the sages of old. But I am not buying it. History is replete with examples of Greeks and Romans taking the involvement of the deities quite seriously indeed. They "spoke" with them regularly via divination, and decided the fates of men and nations on the results. The occasional ancient skeptic did not the norm make.

I listened to a rabbi speaking on a PBS show on religion. When asked if he believes if god actually exists he said it is irrelevant. Which I took to mean in context of other diague what matters is resulting behavior derived from belief.

I watched Joseph Campbell's series Power Of Myth. What I took away was that the core human aspects depicted by all myths are the same. The metaphors change over time and culture but the underlying message is the same. One of the things he showed was how the image of Buddha in Asia varies with the racial features of different cuktures.

White Jesus vs Black Jesus.

A homeric journey could describe the Rambo movies, he eventually finds his way home.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If religious people are less intelligent on average, then that is less reason to ridicule them, not more.

This is true. In a way it's like a tall basketball player making fun of short people.

But short people aren't selectively short.
It's not like they're 6 foot 4 on any basketball court except the one at the Christain Youth Center, where they're 4 foot 6.

I don't taunt or tease people who are recognizably disabled, but then there is my family. People who are skeptical about every claim in a commercial, seek four opinions on the car they want to buy, research expert opinions on vacation spots, then bitch that 'evolution is only a theory,' or 'evolution is wrong because the big bang violates the law of thermdammics,' or 'atheists really believe in God, but Satan has convinced them that they don't.'

Those people, the ones who put ignorance on like a badge, those are fair game.

In the main I hold that literal religious belief is a triumph of emotion over observation. When I drink my judgement is impaired and I do silly things, even if not immediately harmful, behaviors I would not undertake were I not intoxicated. So I think that religion is an emotional high for many people.

For those truly cognitively impaired it is a case of "When you don't know what you don't know you think you know. This is Dunning Kruger.

The third group are those who use religion as a source of power and wealth, they don't believe a word of the silliness but use it to manipulate others, these are the pious fraudsters.

When I make the mistake of asking myself why it is so important to religious nutters to believe these stories and claims are literally true I only need ask myself why a four-year-old believes in Santa and a Tooth Fairy. No, we should not pick on these people but neither should they pick on us. Lots of time I'm forced to point the gun, sometimes to unload both barrels. It depends on the situation and the individual.

Someone here said they'd rather know than believe. If one believes without knowing one is simply pretending. But it takes a bit of cognition to understand and appreciate that. Not everyone can perform a standing dunk, and many don't even know there's a game of basketball.

 

[Elixir]

Have all those highly intelligent atheists worked out why it is that religiosity confers an evolutionary survival advantage and greater statistical longevity?

Yes, and there are myriad studies into different aspects of the dynamics involved. I'm not here to spoon-feed you, but rest assured that tribalism was once the only hope for the survival of an individual and their progeny. And faith is a measurable benefit to trauma survival, REGARDLESS of the object of that faith. (IOW there's nothing special about YOUR god)

 

[Angry Floof]

As if we didn't already know this. OK - start a timer for the first logical fallacy and/or digression. I have to say, though, that the IMAM name feels rather tongue-in-cheek...

Religious[FONT="] people are less intelligent on average than [/FONT][/COLOR][URL="https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Atheism"]atheists[/URL][FONT="]because faith is an instinct and clever people are better at rising above their instincts, researchers have claimed. [/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#111111][FONT="]The theory — called the 'Intelligence-Mismatch Association Model' — was proposed by a pair of authors who set out to explain why numerous studies over past decades have found religious people to have lower average intelligence than people who do not believe in a god.[/FONT]
[FONT="]A 2013 analysis by University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 out of 63 historic studies.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#111111][FONT="]A [/FONT]negative correlation[FONT="] between intelligence and religion makes sense if religion is considered an instinct, and intelligence the ability to rise above one's instincts, say researchers Edward Dutton and Dimitri van der Linden in their new paper published today.[/FONT]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...eople-faith-instinct-cleverness-a7742766.html

That blurb makes sense to me. Much of religion is indoctrination, which hijacks fear responses. Even when anxiety is a mild undercurrent, it still keeps animal brain on alert. Executive functions, problem solving, and creativity get starved of resources. You can only be so intelligent when animal brain is stealing all the fuel from creative problem solving and analytical thinking.

From the perspective of cognitive traits, the conservative religious tend toward closed versus open (to new ideas, to change, to other cultures, to the unknown). They prefer black-and-white to gray. They seek certainty while ambivalence or open questions scare them.

If you're closed to so much of the world, what happens to your curiosity? If you're scared of questioning and doubting the answers given to you through indoctrination, how would you even notice other possibilities that might be useful to the problem at hand?

If your world view is underwritten by fear, groups and ideologies that seem strong and promise to protect you from threats are probably going to appeal to you. Exposure to the ideology only further hardwires the fear responses and the beliefs associated with them.

You could look at this a bunch of different ways and find the stupefying effects of religious thinking. This is not even starting on specific beliefs and why some really are bad for humans.

Fear and guilt, they're like little murderers of all the things that make us smarter.

 

[phands]

Fear and guilt, they're like little murderers of all the things that make us smarter.

That is a great expression. I'm going to use it! Thank you.

 

[Jobar]

i would love to agree with you, since the views you attribute to the ancients sound a lot more like my own views on divinity than what usually gets trotted around as Christianity around here, and I am also a Pagan after all. Would not mind the august company of the sages of old. But I am not buying it. History is replete with examples of Greeks and Romans taking the involvement of the deities quite seriously indeed. They "spoke" with them regularly via divination, and decided the fates of men and nations on the results. The occasional ancient skeptic did not the norm make.

You're probably right that skepticism has never been the norm in any society of any time, until a very few cultures and nations of the present day, perhaps.

I suspect that during particular periods of the Roman Empire, skepticism was more common than it is in the US today. But I freely admit I might be wrong about that, and only the literate upper crust of Greco-Roman society 'publicly believed in all the gods, but privately in none of them'.

 

[Politesse]

i would love to agree with you, since the views you attribute to the ancients sound a lot more like my own views on divinity than what usually gets trotted around as Christianity around here, and I am also a Pagan after all. Would not mind the august company of the sages of old. But I am not buying it. History is replete with examples of Greeks and Romans taking the involvement of the deities quite seriously indeed. They "spoke" with them regularly via divination, and decided the fates of men and nations on the results. The occasional ancient skeptic did not the norm make.

I listened to a rabbi speaking on a PBS show on religion. When asked if he believes if god actually exists he said it is irrelevant. Which I took to mean in context of other diague what matters is resulting behavior derived from belief.

I watched Joseph Campbell's series Power Of Myth. What I took away was that the core human aspects depicted by all myths are the same. The metaphors change over time and culture but the underlying message is the same. One of the things he showed was how the image of Buddha in Asia varies with the racial features of different cuktures.

White Jesus vs Black Jesus.

A homeric journey could describe the Rambo movies, he eventually finds his way home.

Indeed. I have always found the ontological status of God to be kind of a boring question. When you think about it, the actual physical existence of god (or his height or hair or skin color) doesn't matter half as much as his or her symbolic portrayal by others.

 

[WAB]

If religious people are less intelligent on average, then that is less reason to ridicule them, not more.

This is true. In a way it's like a tall basketball player making fun of short people.

The difference, however, is that many short people are running around telling everyone that they are taller, better basketball players when they're clearly not, and it is only these that deserve correction, and sometimes ridicule.

There is an obvious cognitive inequality.

Like I said, if the study is true, then religious people are less intelligent. This handicap would make them vulnerable to the kind of "I am better than X because Y" thinking. A person lacking in intellectual wherewithal is to pitied, not ridiculed.

The subject of free will is built-in to this discussion. If a person has no control over what they believe, then they are not to be ridiculed, nor should atheists feel superior for rejecting religious claims. According to the commonly held belief that free will is non-existent, no-one ought to be shamed or ridiculed for the operation of their mind. They have no choice.

 

[Lion IRC]

If atheists are smarter than everyone else, they will be judged more harshly at the Pearly Gates.
"What's your excuse?" St Peter will ask. "Dummies were able to figure this stuff out".


See Romans 2. Luke 12. James 3.
Someone who does not know, and then does something wrong, will be judged differently than the person who accounts themself wiser than everyone else and presumes to teach others.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

If atheists are smarter than everyone else, they will be judged more harshly at the Pearly Gates.
"What's your excuse?" St Peter will ask. "Dummies were able to figure this stuff out".


See Romans 2. Luke 12. James 3.
Someone who does not know, and then does something wrong, will be judged differently than the person who accounts themself wiser than everyone else and presumes to teach others.

So your religion requires people to be idiots? That makes sense.

- - - Updated - - -

you think atheists already know they're wrong. What's your evidence for this claim? You have none. Why do you believe a claim that has no evidence and is at best speculation?

And this goes back to your prejudice against atheists. You are presuming that all atheists are fundamentally dishonest.