Scientific studies: Religious people are less intelligent than atheists

Rationalization and mild delusion. Many are indoctrinated. Others lack the knowledge to counter the fantasy. A viral meme flourishing in the shadow places of our minds. A cognitive trap from which too many will never escape. Echoes of primitive hopes and fears. Many reasons.

This is the verse mate referring to events around when Jesus died-
"And the earth did quake and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.” (Matt 27:50-54)

Firstly, there's a Roman centurion's testimony in that verse!
Secondly don't take the zombie thing literally, it just means the whole universe was rocking and rolling as Jesus soaked up all the bad vibes in it like a lightning conductor to give us all a clean slate, making "reality" buckle, glitch and heave-
"The crowd that was there said it had thundered" (John 12:29)

Same sort of "reality buckling" happened in Bethlehem when Jesus was born, there was a UFO hovering overhead, and choirs of angels freaking out the shepherds, like when the Terminator arrived on earth in a crackle of electricity and stuff..

Intelligence is measured in many ways. It is difficult to quantify how smart someone is based only upon their belief system. Just because someone does not agree with you doesn't mean you are smarter then they. It's just your ego trying to justify itself. You might be better at investing than they are, but perhaps they are a better surgeon than you. Whose to say which is "smarter"?

Atheists darling Christopher Hitchens once said - "Christianity, Judaism and Islam is "the axis of evil"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens

Try as I might, I can't see what part of this is evil-
"Love one another, feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the destitute, tend the sick, visit the prisoners, look after the poor"- Jesus of Nazareth (Mark 12:30, John 13:34, Matt 25: 37-40)

so maybe i'm just not as intelligent as atheists (sniffle)

I don't know man. Read the study. I didn't conduct the study. I don't think they quantified the intelligence based on a belief system. I imagine they measured intelligence by IQ score or some verifiable method, and then noted whether they were Christian or not. Would you not agree that someone with an IQ or 160 would be more skeptical and less gullible than someone with an IQ of 50?

Oh man, am I being dragged into this never ending debate. I clearly said over and over and over again that I was talking about fundamentalists. Those are people who believe every word in the bible is true, and everything the Bible says happened, happened. So when the Bible says "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept alone, And came out of the graves after his resurrection...appeared unto many. " That would mean fundamentalists think this really happened, and I simply say, that is absolutely absurd.
Do you honestly think that when the Bible says there's a Roman Centurion witnessing this that that counts as evidence? You need EXTRA BIBLICAL EVIDENCE. It needs to be written in Roman records of the time "The dead were walking in the streets."
I could write a Holy Book and say "I raiseth my hand to my lord Crom, and the dead arouse from their graves and walketh the earth. And there was a CNN News crew there." Would you think that because I said there was a CNN News Crew there filming this, that that would be enough to prove it happened. Of course not. You need evidence outside my Holy Book. You would want to see actual CNN news coverage of the incident. The evidence has to come from outside, independent sources.

So-called IQ tests don't measure intelligence, they measure enculturation. Someone could be an extremist religious fanatic of the deepest dye and still score well on an IQ test. By the same token, someone could be skeptical about almost any claim you present to them, and yet, if not raised in the dominant culture, could score very poorly on an IQ test.

Scientific study? I doubt it. Apart from the question of how intelligence were measured is the question of how it was determined who were the religious people. Even more of a problem is how atheists were identfied. Does this refer to explicit or implicit atheists? Does it refer to that segment of the church-going population who say they don't believe in god? (That runs at about 10% in surveys by Pew Research in the united States and Ipsos-Reid in Canada.) If religious people are less intelligent than atheists, and an atheists was raised in a religious family, does that mean that they were stupid, but then, upon abandoning their childhood creed, they suddently became really, really smart?

The premise is absurd, and it just fractures me that no one here is examining the the premise and its implications before taking a shot at this idiot contention. For the record, an unsuccessful attempt was made to raise me in the Catholic church, but i abandoned that at about age 13. I did not abandon it because i was skeptical about the existence of god, but because of contempt for the representatives of the church with whom i had dealt almost all my life. I became an atheist (as in, stopped believing in god) about five years later, while at university. There was no sudden, dramatic increase in my grade point average.

For anyone who unquestioningly buys the implications of the title of this thread--i've got a wonderful bridge i could let you have at a knock-down price. It will make you a rich man virtually overnight!

Think "politics" mate..
When christianity began snowballing in popularity after Jesus's execution, the snooty Jewish priests and the posturing Romans said - "Oops better not let on it was us who killed him, quick shred all the documents implicating us or we'll have a Jesusgate scandal on our hands. Let's airbrush him out of history and start hassling christians, and people will soon quickly forget about him"..
Nevertheless 27 books did slip through the net and get published as the New Testament, and 300 years later Christianity became the Roman state religion..

PS- as regards "intelligence", Dawkins for example may have a sheaf of diplomas, but he's been married 3 times and obviously doesn't have the simple intelligence to make a marriage work..
Arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens was married twice and agnostic Carl "billions upon billions" Sagan was married 3 times..

Alright, I am finished arguing, if you're going to go into hypotheticals and change the topic. The topic was extra biblical accounts of something as amazing as the dead walking the streets. Certainly somewhere, someone would have written down "hey dead people are roaming the street" that would not have gone unnoticed. But nice try to change the topic and block that out of your mind like most Christians do when confronted with absurdities and contradictions in the Bible that have no possible explanations other than it's BS and it never happened. Intelligence has nothing to do with whether or not a marriage works. I feel I've lost IQ points just reading that argument.

I don't know man, the link to the study was deleted. Why don't we find the study and read it. We are both guilty of ignorance here, as we are carrying on about a study we haven't bothered to read. IQ tests do not just measure enculturation. That is one of the stupidest myths that is constantly repeated. Mathematics and logic, recognizing patterns has barely anything to do with culture. The verbal portion of an IQ test may have more to do with culture, but measuring your reading comprehension abilities doesn't. The people who make these tests try very hard to get rid of cultural bias, They have PhDs and have been studying how to do that their whole lives. They're not the huge idiots everyone seems to think they are. Tests like the SATs are a very good measure of how someone will perform in academic setting which is why colleges still require them. If you score an 800 on the math portion of the SATs, there's a good chance you will succeed in an engineering program. If you score a 400 on the math section (which means you can barely do algebra or even basic mathematics ) you will probably not do well in an engineering program that has courses 100 times tougher than high school algebra. The military uses IQ tests to determine who can be considered for military intelligence. They don't care about the PC nonsense everyone has been indoctrinated into, they know they are reliable, so they use them. Everyone in the US has access to a library.

Except that I know alot of doctors and other highly educated people who obviously have high IQ's that believe in a higher power. Most people on this planet do. Sure some simpletons believe in God, but some simpletons are also atheists. Studies like these are almost always biased and grounded in someones agenda.

OH MY FREAKING GOD. Please read my other comments. I said exactly that. If this study is accurate, it is ON AVERAGE most atheists are more intelligent than religious people. If you do not understand that, than read up on statistics a little. Also reread my post about how we should judge this study. Then, read the damn study.

Well, i may be ignorant of the putative study, but that doesn't make me guilty of anything. I have no interest in some witless attempt to fight a war with religionists.The attempt to suggest that atheists are more intelligent than religious people is a pointless exercise. The are some truly bone head atheists (i've known far too many not to know that) and there are some brilliant religionists. The joker who started this thread did the same damned thing several years ago. This is old "news." I won't be looking for this alleged "study" because i don't give a rat's ass about allegations of intelligence, especially comparing one group with another. You have fun, now, and play nice

I learned long ago that considering a person beneath one, due to intelligence issues, almost always backfires.

Setanta has no interest in some witless attempt to fight a war with religionists because he is too interested in some witless attempt to fight a war with witless attempts to fight a war with religionists.

And, by the look of it, staking a claim to be an intelligent atheist on the basis of his, presumably, objective comparisons to all the many bone-head atheists he claims to have "known".

Pretty lame, dude.

You must have missed my answer mate so let me try a new tack-
In Stargate Atlantis: 'Season 3 epi 12: "Echoes": Teyla witnesses what appear to be Ancient apparitions, which soon other people start to see.
There ya go,..

As regards the "intelligence" issue, let's throw some bible quotes into the playpen-
Jesus had to tell the spiritual snobs and narrow-minded fundies to get their noses out of their heavyweight theological books and simply glance up to see him standing in front of them- "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." (John 5:39/40)
"The more the words,the less the meaning,and how does that profit anyone?" (Ecc 6:11)
Paul said - "I'm worried lest you be led astray from the simplicity of Christ" (2 Cor 11:3)
"And the common people heard Jesus gladly" (Mark 12:37)
"When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13)
"The law of God makes the simple wise" (Psa 19:7)
"The law of God protects the simple-hearted" (Psa 116:6)
"Who has beaten the world? Whoever believes Jesus is the Son of God" (1 John 5:5)
"Become a fool by the worlds standards in order to become wise" (1 Cor 3:18 )
"Gods words give light and understanding to the simple" (Psa 119:130)
"I love the law of God because its made me wiser than all my teachers" (Psa 119:97-100)
"We don't speak in words taught by mans wisdom,but by Gods" (1 Cor 2:13)
"I may not be a trained speaker but I do have knowledge" (2 Cor 11:6)
Jesus said:- "I thank you Father for hiding these things from the wise and learned,and for revealing them to little children"(Matt 11:25-27)

Well--show me how you would beef it up ed. You're the writer.

I would ask the mods to delete it for me.

That would be lame.