It’s not your belief in God that makes you seem less intelligent. The study says that people who have high i.q.’s are more likely to not believe in god. I think if the study was reformed, you would find that more intelligent people would say that they do not know whether or not there is a god or who god might be. The issue non-religious people really have, is that our laws are modeled from the bible. Asking a religious family member why she even cared that gays were getting married, she replied,”because god wants us to live a moral life”. Now, no matter how hard I tried to explain it, she couldn’t see how this should be none of her damn business. Is it ok for her to smoke cigarettes and say it’s wrong for gays to get married. Both are sins according to what I was taught in my church. Another thing is evolution. Even though she knows very little about evolution, she denies it. There is a wealth of evidence that really makes evolution more than just a theory. The bible, is less than a theory. We can test certain things like whether some of the characters existed, but we can’t test whether or not god was making these miraculous things happen. We can however, prove that things mutate and pass these traits to their offspring. We can also prove that species who mutate too much from their ancestors cannot mate with each other any longer, making them a different species. It’s hard to believe things we have proof for, but defend to end things we cannot prove and even force these morals on others. This is where religious people are viewed as a lesser intelligence. Most non-religious people don’t argue against your belief in god, just your intolerance of others non-beliefs. Now, most of you say that’s not me. If you vote for a politician based on his religious stances, then that probably is you. I’m not bashing the people of religion, but the institution itself. I also believe that there are very intelligent religious people out there, but most the smarter people seem to believe less. Bill Maher’s movie “Religulous”, explains how it’s the certainty that religious people have. That’s ok, it doesn’t affect me. When a law is passed that can only be considered immoral if you look in the bible, it does affect me. Then I start to draw a line in the sand. Certain family members, I won’t talk politics with. My disbelief in The Bible, gives me a certain set of my own morals. One of the most immoral things I can think of is being a hypocrite. Every religious person I know seems to be this, even if they don’t realize it. I don’t believe in their religion and see them nit-picking sins. Like, it’s ok if I drink this wine, but not ok if you smoke pot. As far as spending the money on something better, I think it was great. The religious people now know that you shouldn’t send your kid to college. I have to agree with this. The more I learned, the less I believed.

He took the top 10 favorite books from each school on Facebook and then mapped them against the schools’ average SAT scores. The results?
“The Holy Bible” is 50 points below “I don’t read” which is 50 points below “The Bible”. It seems whether or not one chooses to emphasize the religious aspect has an impact.

Yes, I know what Virgil did doesn’t count as a proper scientific study. It’s more of a “huh…wouldja look at that…”

My opinion…… Eric

So what?

To me, the idea of God is just plain ridiculous, from a rational viewpoint. It’s an ingenious (because you can’t prove nor disprove it) invention of mankind, for the purposes of 1) filling voids of knowledge and 2) controlling the masses (as Nietzsche said, it’s a manifistation of our “will to power”: the weak invented this “Jenseits” to control the strong). IMHO of course.

That doesn’t mean we should completely rule out the idea, obviously. That wouldn’t be very scientific and rational either. I’m just saying I can’t see any reason to actively believe in God: it seems like a waste of time, since we’ll never know the truth (unless you really believe in afterlife)…

Personally I believe in the existence of GOD, and I’ve known people who are well educated and not by a chance unintelligent who also believe in GOD. It’s not like believing in GOD = ignorance, or the other way around.

Like some of the commentators say probably the best thing is to not let indoctrination guide you to faith, while studies, reading and learning should be the way of understanding and accepting the existence of a greater being.

IMHO…