Religion vs IQ

[illbill]

Provides a site that explores the correlations between religious and non-religious folk.


http://www.realopinion.com/realboards/showthread.php?t=133

[MaryH]

1. Look at the Jesuits - they are the intellectual elite but they

are religious. And now I will go and read the article.

Well I can't read the article. My computer is not state of the art enough.

[Sanity Claws]

2. What's the point?

Are you trying to saying anyone who thinks religion is important is less intelligent than those who believe religion is not important?
Also, how are you tying this in to this website? Are you implying that Democrats are not religious or don't think religion is important? That is not a plank in any democratic platform that I know of.
My understanding is that the party believes that religion does not belong in politics, not that its members are anti-religion.

[illbill]

4. Hmm...

Not to be confrontational, but do you take everything as a personal insult? I thought Republicans were of that nature?

Additionally, I simply came across the site today and figured I would post it in the Off-Topic lounge. I, for one, believe it relates more to the Republican party. The Western culture and capitalism corrupts the majority of religious folk because they have no time to be very devout and spend time studying their religion because of work constraints and also, the media makes us desire everything of the opposite of what Christianity wants us to cherrish.

[billyskank]

3. Yeah, yeah, yeah

only the feeble-minded need to invent an imaginary friend to help them cope with the big bad scary world but CLEVER people can cope on their own without needing to resort to hokum, etc. Heard it already, thanks.

[jdots]

5. thanks for the site

the most religious people out there are quantum physicists,just the people that the fundys of all stripes think are anti religion.The definition of religious has been turned around by the neocon think tanks to add to thier mandate of hypocracy and greed.Being able to be brain washed or hypnotised has little to do with intelligence.Orthodoxy is maybe a chemical funtion of some brains,like depression or being a ditto head. Thanks again for the site it is a good one.

[dryan]

6. With all due respect....

I'm not sure what the point is of this except to imply that religous people are not very intelligent. I am a devout Roman Catholic who has been a member of MENSA since 1977.

[Nikia]

7. I question this data

First of all, it does not correlate individual religious belief. It correlates the religiousness of countries with the average IQ, which may have more to do with other factors such as poverty and culture.
I also question how they came up with this average IQ data. If this was a general IQ that is typicslly administered in the U.S. and Europe, there may be cultural factors that make it hard for people in non Western cultures to understand certain questions. I also find it hard to believe that the average IQ in some countries is so low. Isn't an IQ of around 70 considered mentally retarded with 80 usually being special ed and 60 trainable? Do they consider illiteracy, for example, proof of a low IQ or difficulty figuring out machines? In some of these countries, that does not mean that they would be unable to do these things, but rather that they have never been given enough exposure to these things. I sense racism and ethnocentricity in this data. This is the kind of thing that people who like to justify taking over a country with words like "the country's citizens are too stupid to take care of themselves."

[slutticus]

8. I see 2 very distinct regions of this data...

There is the tailing end, where IQ varies inversely with "religious importance". Then there is the first part of the data, where IQ remains relatively independent of "religious importance" (up to about 40%).

I am an atheist, but I feel that I must stick up for my fellow religious DUers. I suspect that most religious people here on DU are in the initial data range, where IQ remains constant with respect to "religious importance". I suspect that the end of the data, where IQ sharply drops, is the region of "fundies" and extremists.

What this data tells me, is that even with 40% "religious importance" (which seems like a lot to me!), IQ does not change in a statistically meaningful way.