Are people who believe in God “weaker” than people who don’t?

This is a typical, and pathetic thread. Every so often, we have someone come along who attempts to suggest that religious believers are stupid, and stupid precisely because they are religious believers. Was Augustine of Hippo stupid? Was Pythagoras stupid? Was William of Occam stupid?

If atheists and agnostics want to make themselves feel better by proclaiming all religious people to be stupid, they may help themselves. And i, an atheist all my adult life, and a despiser of the very stupid people whom make a religion of their atheism, will always protest at the stupidity of this point of view.

Science has shown atheists have a higher intelligence than people with a strong religious faith. The difference is 5.8 points according to findings in developmental psychology!!!

More members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

Only 7 percent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God. Whilst only 3.3 percent believed in God in the UK’s Royal Society.

Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQ’s tend not to believe in God."

However this thread is about "weakness" not IQ .

When I say “weaker” in the question, I am referring to people’s mental or cognitive abilities, and how it would seem that people who don’t believe in God have better cognitive abilities than people who do

You kn0w, Bill, there is an hilarious irony here that i'm sure escapes you entirely. You are attempting to argue that people who believe in god are intellectually "weaker" than people who don't (in case you've forgotten, that's the thesis of this thread). Yet you are yourself barely able to construct a coherent sentence, and the sentences you do write often can only be deciphered by careful reading. You misspell words and conjugate English verbs incorrectly in a chronic manner. Misspellings are common to the speakers of any language, but the incidence of such misspellings is low--far lower than is the case with you. Furthermore, for all that people with a good command of their native language may occasionally conjugate a verb incorrectly, it is extremely rare. You commonly conjugate verbs incorrectly, and usually the problem is that the verb forms don't agree in number with the subject.

The average religious believer, who goes to church every Sunday and reads a bit of the Bible every evening etc, does not really engage with what they believe in, in a way that “exercises” their cognitive abilities. Rather, they are fed this belief system or world-view and they passively absorb it into their minds, to the point where it is not questioned.

Now, in the case of people who have better cognitive abilities, such people don’t simply passively absorb information thoughtlessly, rather they have the ability to engaged and critically question the information that they receive

Leaving aside my disgust with anyone who uses the noun impact as a verb, i will simply ask you what it is that you think "raw intelligence" is supposed to mean. As for Bill, i have a long experience of him which convinces me that he has no basis to claim that he is any brighter than your average high-school educated holy roller.