Do you think less of theists intelligence?

To me believing in god is like believing in Santa Claus, so I kind of lose a little respect for people intellectually if they're theists. I mean the only thing backing their beliefs is an old book of stories their parents told them to follow and not question.


Of course they all feel sorry for me for not finding Jesus, so I guess we're even.

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nah, really smart people can believe the most ridiculous things, so i guess maybe theists are not really dumb, just misinformed?

 

No there are clearly intelligent people on both sides.

 

They just have a more clearly inherant sense of the fear of nothingness after death.Therefore=assurance and reassurance needed.

 

Just google religion and IQ and you'll find countless studies that support higher IQs in atheists.

 

Really? I've never heard of any such study...but you're probably right, being an atheist and all.

You had your mind made up before the thread even started.

 

I do question people's intelligence when they put anyone who believes in a higher power in the same boat as crazy people who believe a book as truth.

There are extremely intelligent people who are religious as well, people who have dedicated their lives to study philosophy and religion, who are spiritual, who know the questions you'll ask them before you even know to ask it.

Yet, you (and many athiests out there) label them as "people who believe in crazy things cause they're written in a book".

Religious people, spiritual people, some who believe in a higher power don't all fall in the same category.

Ask me if I think those christian right wing followers are crazy, I'll say yes. Just like those extremist athiests who label ALL religious people in the same category are being unreasonable. But it's unfair to put everyone in the same category.


If that's the case, what are agnostic people? a little less intelligent that religious people but more intelligent than religious ones?

 

No, not at all.
You're an idiot.

 

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All a thousand times more intelligent than you.

 

Atheists with no balls. They just need to grow a pair...

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I think less of absolute majority of human beings' intelligence, with no discrimination of theists or atheists.

 

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No, theists have produced some of the greatest works of art through out history, that takes in my opinion a rather high intellect.

And of course all the wonderful fiction those lax a daisy, daydreamers have conjured, that takes intelligence also I would think.

Believing in it however,

Can someone be both ignorant and intelligent?

 

As I mentioned it numerous times, enormous majority of human beings are complete imbeciles.

In most instances their equally fanatical claims of belief or disbelief are nothing but a mere veil to hide the total lack of intelligence behind.

 

right on

 

yes, have you ever run into an educated moron ? there's alot of them on the internet.

 

Statistically speaking I probably should, but I've met too many stupendously dumb atheists to be that judgmental. Someone who admits they don't know something will 9 times out of 10 be infinitely smarter than someone who insists he does.

 

And of course, practically speaking, intelligence is not merely a single marks-out-of-ten-type scale. One can be incredibly intelligent in one way and dumb as a rock in another. The standard example is the savant, but that's an unnecessary extreme. We all meet people who, despite a great deal of intelligence, are still capable of doing profoundly stupid things. A lot of very smart people lack well-developed social skills, for example. A lot don't, and I don't buy into the idea that it's a trade-off. Similarly, knowledge, while not the same as intelligence, is often a factor in how intelligent we think someone is. A person may possess a great deal of knowledge about computers, say, but not necessarily be able to outwit a caveman at anything that doesn't involve them. This is also part of the reason why trans-disciplinary research is so important in academia - someone coming into a field with a fresh mind will make connections and leaps that a seasoned pro in that field would automatically dismiss at a subconscious level.

Either way, the whole idea that religion is a) for stupid people, and thus b) connotes stupidity is one that really needs to be dealt with. Even hardcore, abolish-religion-in-my-lifetime-please atheists should accept that their "opposition" may be every bit as smart as them and quite possibly a lot smarter. If nothing else, it prevents them from making fools of themselves in front of their peers when arguing with a religious person.

 

I did google religion and IQ. The only studies I could find were those attempting to correlate countries having a high percentage of believers with IQ levels. There are at least three methodological problems here: (1) the ecological fallacy: tying to generalize about individuals on the basis about data aggregated for larger populations; (2) failure to control for other variables such as GNP; and (3) inability to account for the "outlier" that does not fit the pattern: the United States, with higher levels of both religiosity and IQ. I do not conclude from this that atheists are less intelligent because they accept conclusions based on flawed studies. However, these problems do raise some questions about the intelligence of the OP. No, I won't even go that far. The OP's faulty generalization simply shows what others have been saying: that we're all human, and no matter how "smart" we are, we're capable of letting our preconceptions outweigh our judgment.

The whole notion of IQ as a measure of a single factor called "intelligence" has come under a lot of attack in recent years. As for Santa Claus, I've had some debates in the Christian forum lately that convince me that comparison isn't too far off where some otherwise intelligent believers are concerned. Before writing us all off as childlike, uncritical boobs, though, you need to find out what the believers actually believe and why. I've noticed a tendency on the part of atheists I know to assume believers are products of psychological and sociological pressures, while their own beliefs are the result of logic, reason and science. Talk about naive, childlike thinking.

 

To put it simply I have not found any compelling arguments or evidence to suggest that there is a deity. But then again does it matter whether it is true or not so long as its believed. That goes for a lot of things people believe in.