Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

[devonin]

Re: Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

You can't judge IQ based on if a person is religous or not. It doen't work that studies full of lies. My friends who are religous are acually doing better in school than me. There is no way to prove without an invalid result that religous people are dumber.

Rather than simply delete your post, I'll give you a first warning: I'll even do it all in red so it looks official:

Read the thread before you post in the thread or you risk looking incredibly stupid and unobservant.

At no point in the study, or the discussion of the study did anyone try to claim that someone's IQ was based in any way on whether they were religious or not.

Please understand the topic at hand before you comment on it.

[Tokzic]

Re: Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

This seems to have been written without having noticed what we mentioned earlier. It is logical, once you think about it, as many "scientists" as there are moving about and everyone on their own types of tasks and such that not every small claim or finding is necessarily likely to be given the time of double checking by multiple groups. It isn't that most aren't, but no one could possibly say with full clarity that nothing slips through the cracks, it's human error and it is everywhere regardless of our efforts to minimize it.

An excellent example of how this isn't nearly on the scale that you're making it out to be is Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone. Obviously not every single bit of science is sound, but when you have millions of people with different specialities viewing the same facts, there is bound to be someone who notices error and feels the need to correct it. Some are glaring errors, and others are minor, poorly worded or slightly shaky, and some people have their interpretation of the facts skewed by it, but all of the errors tend to be weeded out in the end.

[devonin]

Re: Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

Further, "People are prone to error, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose" is a horrible reason to try arguing that you ought not to believe anything you hear.

Some people are prone to hijack a plane, should we ban all plane flights?

[ZanasoBayncuh]

Re: Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

Further, "People are prone to error, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose" is a horrible reason to try arguing that you ought not to believe anything you hear.

Some people are prone to hijack a plane, should we ban all plane flights?

I guess I can leave with your misunderstanding that I meant it to that extreme. But the correct phrase is "Don't believe everything you hear." But in this case, I meant read, and you're still overlooking the fact that EVERYTHING doesn't get doublechecked, but I'm done, I just need to get this thing unsubscribed.

[devonin]

Re: Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

If you don't mean your statement in the extreme, don't use language that indicates you mean it in the extreme. Your posts indicated a fairly scathing indictment of science as a whole, based it seemed, on the fact that the average layman elects to not individually fact-check every scientific concept they are exposed to.

[Dark Ronin]

Re: Religious people aren't as smart as Atheists

What I'm saying is that people act as if ALL of it is completely pure and without infidelity.

I'm not saying that it always happens, what I'm trying to point out is that as it does happen more than we would like to think, and more often than the scientific body would like to portray.

You seem to have the idea that I'm speaking partisanly, by that last sentence. But as for the rest of it, yes there is Scientific Method, by which no one... or at least no science textbook that I've seen can even agree to how many steps there are or what they are past the first two. The fact is anyone could test something get some results then say they got other results and get several to attest to it. Not every other group has the time to spend testing every little result out there especially when they agree with the findings naturally and biasly. It isn't necessarily a big conspiracy... if someone walked up to you and asked a question based on opinion, offering you a possible answer, if that answers sounds good to you then you might not bother looking into it. All it takes from time to time is liar #1.

I may be wrong here but what I think your trying to get across is that we hear all the crap about how this is has been scientifically proven and so it must be completely true, and 90% of the people out there seeing it on TV completely suck up every bit of it. It really goes along with what I was saying earlier about how everything we think we know could be wrong. You make a good point (I say this mostly because I tried to make the same one), but there is a flaw.

The scientific community does not simply accept facts. The people who do the major studies do them in hopes of becoming famous or helping humanity. They want to make sure all their bases are covered and most spend a good part of their lives working on them. Once completed the studies are peer reviewed then published. Then they are reviewed some more, And after hundreds of people do the exact same study and get the exact same results it is accepted as fact. The true scientific community is extremely thorough.

I think what you’re referring to is more of the mass media. If that’s what you mean then you’re right on spot. You can’t trust anything you hear on TV. I've even caught the news lying outright several times. 80% of it is propaganda. But people think, “Wow that guy looks smart he must be know what he’s talking about”, or “I saw it on the news so it must be true”. Sadly Devonin caught me in one of those moments after a conference I went to, a man at the conference clamed to be important and had a 15 minuet reading of his achievements, so I just completely accepted everything he said. It can happen to the best of us. But it’s not some big conspiracy. We have the internet now so you can research pretty much anything, and we can always do research on our own. If you find a flaw in an article in a scientific journal, report it! You could become famous, that’s what the journals are for. I personally have never seen a mistake in any scientific study, I look for them, I just can’t find one...