Religious Belief and intelligence ?

Question

At the Wkipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
I found the following information,
"Several studies have investigated the relationship between intelligence (as measured by grades, education and a few other factors) and the degree of religious belief, with most showing a negative correlation."
It amazes me some of the dogmatic inflexible and what I consider silly responses I and others get to questions here from Christians. They seem unwilling to read anything that challenges their dogma.
Do you think the quote above is partly the reason for this.?

Answer 1

Yes!!! Together with a lack of life experience. Most of these people are teenagers who have had a relatively comfortable life. As a consequence they have not seen hardship or even had to think for themselves

Answer 2

This is a hard question to answer because intelligence is a hard thing to define. By most people's standards, intelligence has to do with how much knowledge one has. However, I believe intelligence to be the ability to solve problems. Unfortunately, most religious people solve problems with faith, which usually doesn't solve but rather just makes them feel better about God's plan. However, there are some very intelligent religious people. Usually closer to the top of the chain. Most intelligent people question religion to the point at which faith no longer makes sense. Just for the record, I have an IQ of 165 and I believe that no religion is right. Most simply exist to keep people in the dark, and to control the masses. I believe in something (what you might call God) but I reached my conclusions on my own. I will never believe the words of someone else simply because they claim them to be the truth.

Answer 3

Do I think "religious fanatics" perform worse in school?

It's gonna depend on the specific person, but I think they ARE at a disadvantage.

Part of doing well in school is creativity. Creativity in projects, presentations, studying techniques, and group assistance can all be seen regularly.

Another part is learning logical thought and how it applies to a situation. Both of these abilities go dull if not practiced.

Religions teach not to question. To know religion merely requires encyclopedic knowledge and repetition. This means that someone who is brilliant at their religion and know everything in their specific Holy Book isn't necessarily able to discern how to find the most logical information in many cases.

Religion, in many cases, has merely become regurgitation of what parents, preachers, and books have told you. It's not encouraged to find a new way to put it or to question the information so that you glean more from it or different things from it than the person next to you. This handicaps a lot of folks in school because they're limited to what is printed in front of them. Unfortunately, with time, regurgitation isn't what will make a good student.

Answer 4

I think some religions narrow your mind and block your thought processes. Many religious leaders basically tell people not to think. It's all laid out in the holy book and therefore you just read and do whatever it, or your preacher etc., says. People are therefore encouraged never to think or question anything on their own, and lose, or never develop the ability to do so.

If someone's built their life around a particular idea, and never thought beyond it, and you then question that idea, they feel threatened and get defensive, hence the ignorant dogmatic answers.

Well that's what I think anyway!

Answer 5

I deffently agree.

Everyone I know in the uper 5% range are all eather athest, agnostic, or have there own system of belifes outside of any religion.

I myself am in the uper 1% and am agnostici n the prosses of slowly forming my own belifes.....

Though it is a frustraitingly slow when so little of the metaphisical happenings make any sense. Then again such things happen around me a lot so I have a lot more to question..... some one with a less active life would have proble figured things out by now *sighs* >.>

Answer 6

What I find obsurb is suedo intellectuals like yourself that try to challenge a faith like Christianity. What are you trying to prove? If you don't believe that's fine with me. It's your right to do so, and nobody will blame you in the least. But you, on the other hand, attempt to look for ways to discredit those who believe. You are on the attack, and we see it. There is no tolerance or getting along, you want to drive us into the sea, much like the muslims want to drive Israel into the sea.

You think ur so smart do ya? You think Christians are so dumb do you? I suppose one or two of your Athiest professor friends did the research ur referring too, and because they got their sheepskin presented to them by other athiest professors at some atheist university that teaches darwinism, that is supposed to mean something? Yeah, to the secular minded person, I suppose it does. But if the likes of you were really so intelligent I suppose you would be out earning your Nobel Peace Prize for being a Smart Mother Fukka, instead of sitting on your oversized bunghole taking potshots at Christians.

Answer 7

I may agree to that correlations...but the same is not true for spirituality (the real spirituality...not its christian version)

Mental evolution, should normally bring intelligence, but sometimes it is too fast that intelligence becomes but a spark in the journey...and the person reaches the heights of spirituality.

Jesus, Buddha, Vivekananda etc...are such examples of high mental evolution.

Followers of imperfect religions, are normally low on mental evolution scale...but that is what Mother nature choses for them

Answer 8

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. - Twain attributed this to B. Disraeli

It has long recognized by public men of all kinds ... that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics. - H. Belloc

Figures don't lie, but liars figure. - Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain)

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment - Ernest Rutherford

My I.Q. is over 185, not bragging..just making a point

Answer 9

correlations do not mean causality

that is, religion does not cause low intelligence

and low intelligence does not cause religious belief

...based on your statistics

correlations are always open to alternative explanations

for example, perhaps the religious people whom you find so narrow minded and dogmatic are children, who are not fully developed intellectually. someone else mentioned this

additionally, we need to look at the circumstances of the people that believe, are they struggling? are they suffering? would they respond differently to your questions if they weren't struggling and suffering?

this requires the process of empathising - putting yourself in the other's shoes. if you think about it a bit, you will begin to have some compassionate feelings. perhaps you will feel tremendously sorry that these people have to make themselves closedminded and dogmatic so as to survive such lives of hardship. perhaps they have no resources to devote to such 'higher order' thinking... such luxuries are for when they are not constantly assaulted with the need to survive.

empathise. feel it in your gut. take the time out and look from a vantage point over this forum and over religious believers. take a look for yourself at what life circumstances generally accompany religious belief. see if you suffer under the same life circumstances.

perhaps answering these two questions of mine will get you on that track (they relate exactly to this idea)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AltES_o3mJsTgN.wNZf_YNvsy6IX?qid=20060611005839AAHZxr8
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Am90wTeiqmwVuzMwEWC6YmLsy6IX?qid=20060611003310AAaWGnS

it's time to start looking deeply at and feeling the full gravity of what it means to believe religiously. what it means to put faith in irrational things. this means circumstances are very bad. we have to make a huge compromise. can you see that? can you see how not everyone is comfortable and affluent, and can entertain refined points of argument all day long like us, casually, on y1a?

next time you feel frustrated and even angry at another closed minded, dogmatic a or q based on religion, take a step back. look at the person's possible life circumstances. ask yourself where they're coming from. it will help you not to declare war too quickly, which is what you may be doing here.

it will help you, also, in developing ways to combat this problem. the thing is, for them, it's not a problem, because other demands are more important to satisfy than those of the critical thinker.

let's leave it up to them to decide what is important to do, to think, in their life of intense suffering and hardship. hell, you never know what they might be being confronted with on a regular basis. perhaps it would be one of the most enlightening things you've ever done to actually ask them. 'what is the hardship you suffer so much?' 'how does religion help you with that?' 'how does being closed minded and dogmatic help you deal with the hardship?'

overall though, i agree, we need to try to thing critically, which means being open minded, non egocentric and non sociocentric thinkers. so perhaps even these people, when they no longer suffer and struggle, will want to learn how to think critically. i think it might be one of the first things we should try to learn to do well when we make it out of the life of suffering and struggle into a life of affluence, comfort and, some would say, ultimately - atheism.

Answer 10

I'm not Christian, but Muslim and proud. I had two IQ tests and showed I have an IQ of 115, and I'm religious. So this article is only a theory, and wikipedia is a collection of articles REGULAR people wrote, it might be some atheist like yourself did!

Answer 11

yes. a hard structured ignorant religion, or any religion that id depriving from basic life dealing skills is almost debilitating. you cant blame everything on god and justify what you don't like with bible quotes. that's memorization, not a mental process. just reading off a script that someone told you was right. yes, i believe the statement is true.