Religiosity is brain damage, and correlates inversely with intelligence

[phands]

This is fascinating, and not too surprising.....

Do hormones and physiology have any role in whether you believe in God? Such is the implication of a recent study published in the journal Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology
The study’s author Aniruddha “Bobby” Das of McGill University conducts research on how social factors influence human physiology and “the other way around”. His research found that religion has a great impact on the human body. In particular, older men with higher levels of the sex hormone testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) are less religious.

“Religion seems to influence all kinds of physiological processes,” said Das.“There’s a lot of work these days on spirituality, church attendance — multiple dimensions of religiosity — as buffers against cardiovascular and metabolic problems. There’s a separate strand of research on how hormones and social factors cause each other. Hormones are not just static ‘internal’ factors — they respond to our social lives.”
​

The study looked at data from 1,071 older (57+) American men who took part in the 2005-2006 and 2010-2011 waves of the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP).
Das determined that men who showed higher levels of testosterone and DHEA at wave 1 actually exhibited weaker religious ties when it came time for the follow-up. They attended fewer religious services and had less contact with religious figures.

And it seems religious people "exhibit poorer cognitive performance"....

Other studies, like this 2017 one from Imperial College London, that have looked at physiological differences between religious and non-religious people found that "religiosity correlates inversely with intelligence". In that research, the scientists found that atheists surpass religious people in reasoning skills but not working-memory performance. The religious were found to rely more on intuition and showed poorer cognitive performance.

 

[phands]

Jobar is looking at starting another thread on this topic - I wonder if that will get any conversation going.

 

[rousseau]

Yes, religion is more often associated with people of low intelligence.

You can easily re-frame literal belief as a puzzle that people need to think their way out of. It takes problem solving skills to deduce that religion is untrue, so therefore we should expect people with greater problem solving skills to have a greater likelihood of doing so, and people with poorer problem solving skills to remain believers. This also rings true for a host of other things. Pertinent book: The Intelligence Paradox

At the same time I'm still a bit hesitant to get all militant about religion, and these days knowing what I know, I think there is some value to be had in letting people believe in fairy-tales. I know that others in the world will eventually fight fairy-tales out of existence.. but honestly, if a friend of mine is made happy by belief in God, more power to them.

 

[ruby sparks]

The first study doesn't seem to be about brain damage.

As for the second one, I'm wondering how intelligent one has to be to read the conclusions of studies they post:

"These results support the hypothesis that behavioural biases rather than impaired general intelligence underlie the religiosity effect."

 

[repoman]

I think that religion beyond hijacking superstitions and aiding in anxiety dissipation as well as taking credit for the "whoa dude" sense of wonder people can have (especially from magic mushrooms and the like) there are other things that it is has wormed its way into.

Most importantly it somehow uses the underlying tendency of humans (as primates) to have hierarchical power structures. We as a whole will have some hierarchical aspect to society, no getting around it. Everyone always talks about the bad from this in respect to religion, but if it is going to be there anyways that is really shortsighted.

Does religion ever cause there to be less violence because there is this imaginary top dog up in the sky that can't be challenged and will be mad at squabbling down here on earth?

 

[Sarpedon]

Ah, so the conclusion is that it makes you act stupid instead of actually making you stupid.

 

[southernhybrid]

When I have time, I will read all of your linked info, but I'm having a hard time believing that these claims aren't flawed, since I've known many very brilliant, highly educated Christians as well as one Hindu doctor who graduated at the top of her medical college. And, I have met some rather stupid atheists, so there's that.

 

[Lion IRC]

Jobar is looking at starting another thread on this topic - I wonder if that will get any conversation going.

Oh joy. ANOTHER thread about this canard. Why is the atheosphere so fixated on trying to brag about how atheists are just oh so much smarter than everyone else?

Well I'm going to brag now. My religion welcomes everyone of all IQ's and we aren't impressed by haughty, egotistical, self-centred snobs.

#emotional_IQ

 

[bilby]

Jobar is looking at starting another thread on this topic - I wonder if that will get any conversation going.

Oh joy. ANOTHER thread about this canard. Why is the atheosphere so fixated on trying to brag about how atheists are just oh so much smarter than everyone else?

That would be because we eschew the massive logical fallacies that theists seem to revel in.

Atheists and theists alike make intellectual and epestemic errors; But Atheists differ from theists in not making those errors central to their worldview.

Well I'm going to brag now. My religion welcomes everyone of all IQ's and we aren't impressed by haughty, egotistical, self-centred snobs.

#emotional_IQ

That's nice.

But stupid.

Anyone can be an atheist. You don't need to be particularly smart; You just need to avoid making errors into the foundational axioms of your thought processes.

 

[Underseer]

Sigh. This topic again.

Look, if you examine the metastudies (individual studies can say almost anything), the difference in average IQ is generally around 4 to 6 IQ points between atheists and theists. Since the average is by definition 100, we're talking about histograms with a difference in averages of 4% to 6%. That difference is statistically significant and probably of great interests to sociologists, neuroscientists, etc, but in practical terms, it's too small to care about.

And mind you, in the industrialized world lots of theists are deconverting to atheist, so the difference in average IQ is probably going to get smaller as time goes on.

They aren't stupid, they're indoctrinated. People they trust told them that they have to believe certain things or else they will be tortured after they die. If you believed that, don't you think you would trip over yourself to avoid understanding counterarguments and use every logical fallacy you could find in order to avoid looking too carefully at any other conclusion?





The above videos are merely additional information not critical to any argument I'm making.

Atheism is not a magic logic pill that makes us smarter. It just isn't. For nearly every topic outside of religion, if there is a stupid belief, I've run into atheists who believe it, including, but not limited to

• 9/11 was an inside job
• The Waco massacre was a sinister conspiracy by the FBI
• Vaccines cause autism
• Jade Helm 15
• Eating GMO produce will cause health problems in humans
• Them UN black hellychoppers are comin' for us!
• Eating organic produce provides health benefits for healthy humans
• Obama is a secret Muslim sent here as a terrorist-baby-spy to infiltrate America
• Climate change is a sinister conspiracy run by Al Gore an obscure college in the UK
• JFK/RFK were actually killed by[ent]hellip[/ent]
  • The Russians
  • The Mafia
  • The CIA
  • The FBI
  • Aliens (Ok, I made this one up)
  • Ted Cruz's dad
  • Fucking hell, I'm not going to list them all.
• Pizzagate
• Sandy Hook was staged by "crisis actors"
• There are health benefits for healthy people taking vitamin supplements
• Tax cuts and deregulation help people other than the economic elites
• Big Pharma has a secret cure for cancer, but they refuse to release it because profit
• Uranium one
• Country and western counts as a form of music
• Benghazi
• Superfood is a valid scientific concept and eating them will make you healthier
• Whitewater
• But her email!
• Deep state anything
• Toddler concentration camps are perfectly reasonable
• Why didn't Trump get a Nobel peace prize for the North Korea thing?
• Having a health care system like every other developed nation would be too expensive. Who can afford to save money?

If you managed to fight your way out of the emotional manipulation of religious indoctrination, good for you. You manged to overcome a lot to make a better decision about exactly one question. One. Only one. Please stop acting like that makes us mental giants compared to theists.

 

[Underseer]

For the record, I've never run into an atheist who believes that Obama has a secret weather weapon that he's going to use as part of a plot to confiscate our guns. So I guess[ent]hellip[/ent] yay us? Then again, this could just be a statistical anomaly due to the anecdotal nature of the evidence.