More of the broken record

Wiki Link:

All but four of the forty-three polls listed support the conclusion that native intelligence varies inversely with degree of religious faith; i.e., that, other factors being equal, the more intelligent a person is, the less religious he is.

Conclusions

In this essay:

sixteen studies of the correlation between individual measures of student intelligence and religiosity, all but three of which reported an inverse correlation.

five studies reporting that student bodies with high average IQ and/or SAT scores are much less religious than inferior student bodies;

three studies reporting that geniuses (IQ 150+) are much less religious than the general public (Average IQ, 100), and one dubious study;

seven studies reporting that highly successful persons are much less religious in belief than are others; and

eight old and four new Gallup polls revealing that college alumni (average IQ about 115) are much less religious in belief than are grade-school pollees.

There's a lot more in the link.

So.. being reasonable, we accept the fact that religious people tend to be lower in I.Q., I wonder what that means for society moving forward?

Now, I will grant that this is not necessarily true for Mormons. It seems they have a very high drive to push people through higher education. Mormons tend to describe themselves as more religious the more educated and intelligent they are. I don't really dispute that.

Isn't that odd? How is it that Mormons flip the paradigm?

My theory is that while religiosity and intelligence are inversely proportional in traditional religion, the opposite is true in cult religions. The Heaven's Gate cult is a good example. Many of their members were web designers and other assorted IT types, and in fact they made money selling IT services.

The Heaven's Gate cultists believed that upon their suicide, they'd be transported to the spaceship that followed the Hale-Bopp comet. Clearly that type of belief goes far beyond the beliefs of traditional religion, into the realm of psychotic delusions. But - the Mormons believe they have magic underwear, and Joseph Smith pulled their religion out of a hat. Clearly, psychotic delusion as well.

I've had something of a personal awareness of this recently. It seems that a member of my gaming guild is religious. On our guild forum, I bring up topics in politics or religion, and a particular discussion got stranger and stranger, until at one point he wrote;

I already said that I will not reveal the means by which the truth was restored. It has no place being discussed in a video game forum and I would politely ask that if anyone is aware of how this occurred to NOT post it here. It is a simple request.

Yep - Mormon.

Now, up until that point he was making some traditional points about Christianity, written with very good skill for his age, about his church and so on. Much of it was level headed, as level headed as "belief" can be, indicating that he's quite well above in intelligence. Then, when the pressure got cranked up, he went into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest territory. Clearly he's been brought up in a borderline psychotic environment. Rational people just don't jump off the cliff of sanity.