Hannah Osborne wrote, “Atheists More Intelligent Because They Can Override “Instinctive” Religious Beliefs—But It Will Be Their Downfall,” Newsweek, May 18, 2017 AD. It is an article consisting of Atheist worldview dogma which is generic enough to be meaningless.
The main claim is “Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people because they are able to rise above the natural instinct to believe in a god or gods, scientists have said.” Now, I am a big believer in defining terms before jumping into argumentative frays. Thus, whenever I hear about “smart,” “intelligent,” etc. I wonder just what that means. After all, these are subjective metrics (if they are metrics at all) since, for example, there are people with very sharp “street smarts” who are academic dumb-dumbs and conversely there are people who are academically very “smart” who have no basic common sense, etc.
There is also the issue of who is more “educated” which means who has attended more schooling within institutions which basically teach the Atheist catechism (such as every public school) so that those who come out the other end, ends up with more secular propaganda and are thus counted as “educated,” “smart” and “intelligent.” Thus, when you read that “scientific studies suggest a clear correlation between lower intelligence and religiousness” you should not only note the qualifying term “suggest” which usually means that the Atheist subjectively interpreted it as such but you should ask just what is meant by “intelligence.”
Now, the article is based on a study by Edward Dutton (Ulster Institute for Social Research, U.K.) and Dimitri Van der Linden (Rotterdam University, Netherlands) who “build on the theory that religion is instinctive, and it evolved as a behavior that helped humans become the highly successful species they are today.” Thus, they presuppose Atheism and evolution and conclude that theism and Atheism are the results of evolution as the way that “religion originated” is that it “evolved to help societies to form.”
The study is titled, “Why is Intelligence Negatively Associated with Religiousness?” (Evolutionary Psychological Science (2017). doi:10.1007/s40806-017-0101-0) and, at least part of the answer may be that intelligence is negatively associated with religiousness by biased Atheists evolutionists who stack the deck by defining “intelligence” and “religiousness” and associating and disassociating them as they please.
Dutton and Van der Linden “say the link between higher intelligence and atheism, and lower intelligence with religion, can be accounted for by our instincts” and “our genes mean belief in religion is instinctive—it did, after all, help us develop as a species” oh, “our genes mean” as much, really? How so? Well, in accordance to an Atheist evolutionist subjective interpretation of genes, of course: it could be nothing else since our genes have told us no such thing rather, Atheist evolutionists have.
Now, “higher intelligence, they say, allows people to override these instincts and engage in more rational, and therefore enhanced problem-solving behavior” and this may “mean heightened intelligence will be selected” yet, “the ability to override your instincts would likely lead to a decline in intelligent, atheist people, because they are more likely to be antisocial and to have fewer children—or to not have them at all.” This last point about lack of producing the next generation of bio-organisms (read, children) is well known (and well depicted in the movie “Idiocracy”)—also well known is Atheists’ propensity towards various sorts of antisocial behavior, see Are Atheists Healthy, Happy, Moral, etc.?
Dutton stated, “It’s true that people who are less intelligent tend to have more children than people who are more intelligent” but they never get around to why this is the case: after all, how intelligent is it to bring your family line to a screeching halt? Well, I will theorize that such is the result of believing that we are all merely temporarily and accidentally existing hairless apes. This, for example, lead Atheists to mass murder some 200,000,000 people in just a couple of decades in the last century: and this was not the result of wars but due to a view that such was simply exterminating human vermin. This also leads to Atheist countries being the world leaders is the production of child porn, see here.
The conclusion is “As a society becomes less religious, and more intelligent, we begin to lose the benefits religion brings in terms of group society” yet, it also “becomes antisocial and stops breeding, and it eventually declines” which may be why so many Atheists are constructing secular religions so that they can have their artificially flavored cake and eat it too.
Now, I must say that it does not seem to me that Atheists (and I have interacted with hundreds if not thousands) are less instinctual and more intelligent since one thing upon which you can count is that they will become emotive at around t=nanosecond one into a discussion. Even Atheists who put up an intellectual front turn themselves into foul mouthed school yard bullies in record speed—perhaps these are at the early stage of evolving into homo superior.
Lastly, note that Edward Dutton states “I think most people think it is rational to be an atheist. But the reason why people are atheist is not necessarily some logical reasoned choice.” Do you see what I mean about the result of a secular education which, in this case, is followed up with functioning within a field of secular academia? He thinks “most people” think it is rational to be an Atheist but, firstly, “most” is meant to be impressive but, for example, 51% is most and yet awfully close to half. In any case, I think most people think it is utterly irrational to be an Atheist so there goes that. Moreover, I fully agree that “the reason why people are atheist is not necessarily some logical reasoned choice” which he means as because it is due to genes. However, I agree due to, for example, my personal experience with Atheists and my specific research on the reasons given by 133 Atheists as to why they became Atheists, see When and Why They Became Atheists Project
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