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Getbig Misc Discussion Boards => Religious Debates & Threads => Topic started by: OzmO on June 27, 2007, 11:23:53 AM
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You could ask the same about whether they believe in God or not.
Any thoughts?
I've kind of come to that conclusion over time. It seems people who are less intelligent "buy into" religion more than people who are smarter than average.
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You could ask the same about whether they believe in God or not.
Any thoughts?
I've kind of come to that conclusion over time. It seems people who are less intelligent "buy into" religion more than people who are smarter than average.
I think this would be the typical elitist mindset of an atheist.
It just makes sense to "knock down" a person or mindset when you don't quite understand or are threatened.
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(assuming you consider Christianity a "religion"....)
The most intelligent person I know is a Christian.
Sir Isaac Newton and C.S. Lewis weren't slouches either :)
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nah, there a quite a few dumb atheists, and quite a few dumb theists.
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I agree with Colossus, Stella, and usmokepole.
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I would say that atheists are more likely to be educated than religious people. This doesn't necessarily mean they are always more intelligent.
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I would say that atheists are more likely to be educated than religious people. This doesn't necessarily mean they are always more intelligent.
i would agree with this. although from my experience i find very dumb people beleive in the noahs ark fairytale stuff, and the other idiots use fallacious arguments to deny god that are plain retarded. i think once you start going up the ladder of intelligence/education you find more rational views on god and more agnositics and atheists.
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i would agree with this. although from my experience i find very dumb people beleive in the noahs ark fairytale stuff, and the other idiots use fallacious arguments to deny god that are plain retarded. i think once you start going up the ladder of intelligence/education you find more rational views on god and more agnositics and atheists.
Yeah, it just seems that way to me too.
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I'm not sure how valid it is to compare atheists with anyone, because there are so few of them.
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I'm not sure how valid it is to compare atheists with anyone, because there are so few of them.
really?
Check #3 three on this list. Though not "atheist" by your standards, the group includes secular humanists, agnostics, and people who don't believe in any particular religion (i.e they are atheist in regard to Christianity for example in the same way that you and I are atheist in regards to Islam)
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
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really?
Check #3 three on this list. Though not "atheist" by your standards, the group includes secular humanists, agnostics, and people who don't believe in any particular religion (i.e they are athetst in regard to Christianity for example in the same way that you and I are Atheist in regards to Islam)
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
Thanks Cuzin' Earl. The thread topic references atheists. My post references atheists. No one mentioned secular humanists or people who don't believe in a particular religion.
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Anyone know how may people believe in god but don't subscribe to any particular religion?
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Thanks Cuzin' Earl. The thread topic references atheists. My post references atheists. No one mentioned secular humanists or people who don't believe in a particular religion.
What's with the Cuzin' Earl thing?
Is that some way to make yourself feel intelligent?
I clarified the statement by explaining (as does the site) that the 3rd largest group includes people that are strictly defined atheist but also others who just don't belong to any particular religion - hence are atheist in regards to Christianity or Islam, etc...
You insist on framing the world in VERY SIMPLE terms when the reality is much more fuzzy and complex
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What's with the Cuzin' Earl thing?
Is that some way to make yourself feel intelligent?
I clarified the statement by explaining (as does the site) that the 3rd largest group includes people that are strictly defined atheist but also others who just don't belong to any particular religion - hence are atheist in regards to Christianity or Islam, etc...
You insist on framing the world in VERY SIMPLE terms when the reality is much more fuzzy and complex
Group of people are having a good discussion. Cuzin' Earl from West Virginia comes to the party and dumbs down the conversation. You = Cuzin' Earl. :)
I'm just an average Joe. I don't ever try and make myself "feel intelligent." Too many things happen to humble me to even try something like that.
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Group of people are having a good discussion. Cuzin' Earl from West Virginia comes to the party and dumbs down the conversation. You = Cuzin' Earl. :)
I'm just an average Joe. I don't ever try and make myself "feel intelligent." Too many things happen to humble me to even try something like that.
Bum, I'm very secure with my own level of intelligence and I'm not from West Virginia although I suspect that the real Cuz'n Earl types in West Virginia are much more likely to sound like you than me.
Seriously though, you really shouldn't be accusing anyone of dumbing down a conversation.
You are the grand champion of that on this site
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Bum, I'm very secure with my own level of intelligence and I'm not from West Virginia although I suspect that the real Cuz'n Earl types in West Virginia are much more likely to sound like you than me.
Seriously though, you really shouldn't be accusing anyone of dumbing down a conversation.
You are the grand champion of that on this site
please increase your iq by 20 points.
i dont beleive in any religion, but i beleive in god.
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please increase your iq by 20 points.
i dont beleive in any religion, but i beleive in god.
can you flesh out this statement for me please
Are you suggesting that if I believe in a god (which one?) that I will become smarter (by an arbitrary IQ test)
Seriously, I'm just not clear on what point you are trying to make
Maybe we should first agree on a definition for atheist
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For the most part, yes.
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Bum, I'm very secure with my own level of intelligence and I'm not from West Virginia although I suspect that the real Cuz'n Earl types in West Virginia are much more likely to sound like you than me.
Seriously though, you really shouldn't be accusing anyone of dumbing down a conversation.
You are the grand champion of that on this site
Whatever you say Cuz. You're same person who believes anyone who holds a "fundamentalist belief" in a religion is "mentally ill."
Maybe Jethro Bodine is better? [I'm humming the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies]
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Whatever you say Cuz. You're same person who believes anyone who holds a "fundamentalist belief" in a religion is "mentally ill."
Maybe Jethro Bodine is better? [I'm humming the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies]
haaaaaaaaaaaaa
that's just wrong! :D
now i can't get that stupid song out of my head. >:(
;D
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Whatever you say Cuz. You're same person who believes anyone who holds a "fundamentalist belief" in a religion is "mentally ill."
Maybe Jethro Bodine is better? [I'm humming the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies]
Yes, and I stand by that statement. Do you think that the people who crashed the planes into the WTC were sane?
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can you flesh out this statement for me please
Are you suggesting that if I believe in a god (which one?) that I will become smarter (by an arbitrary IQ test)
Seriously, I'm just not clear on what point you are trying to make
Maybe we should first agree on a definition for atheist
no get smarter.
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Yes, and I stand by that statement. Do you think that the people who crashed the planes into the WTC were sane?
obviously not, but how can you generalize that to the group?
so if someone is for abortion and strangles babies that makes the pro-abortion beleiving group crazy by association.
you argument is weak as a kitten on valium.
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obviously not, but how can you generalize that to the group?
so if someone is for abortion and strangles babies that makes the pro-abortion beleiving group crazy by association.
you argument is weak as a kitten on valium.
What I gave you was one example of how people who hold fundamentalist (or extreme beliefs) can be viewed be categorized as being mentally ill.
Here is my entire response to Bum on this same topic (aka fundamentalist belief) in a different thread:
IMO - fundamentalist belief = extreme view contrary to evidence acceptable to the majority of intelligent adults
For example - one can certainly identify with a form of Christian thought (or belief in God, higher power, organizing principle etc..) without having to believe that the earth is 10,000 years old or that man arrived on earth in his present form 6000 year ago. Both of those views have nothing to do with a belief in God or the idea that there is an organizing intelligence in the universe/multiverse. In fact those beliefs (creationist views on age of earth/man) are easily refuted by modern science. To believe something like that is akin to a mental illness (IMO).
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Yes, and I stand by that statement. Do you think that the people who crashed the planes into the WTC were sane?
They were sane enough to live in this country as "normal" residents for some time, take flight lessons, and pass themselves off as "normal" passengers. Were they mentally ill? I don't know.
Do you think Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. Robert Schuler, and Dr. Barry Black (Senate Chaplain) were/are mentally ill?
http://www.senate.gov/reference/office/chaplain.htm
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They were sane enough to live in this country as "normal" residents for some time, take flight lessons, and pass themselves off as "normal" passengers. Were they mentally ill? I don't know.
Do you think Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. Robert Schuler, and Dr. Barry Black (Senate Chaplain) were/are mentally ill?
http://www.senate.gov/reference/office/chaplain.htm
No I don't, but I do think that people like Fred Phelps fall into that category though. I might also put Pat Robertson in that category but I think he's more a bullshit artist than actually crazy (although that might be wishful thinking on my part)
I've also never said that merely having a belief in a God (any god/organizing intelligence, etc.. any religion or no religion) is stupid or that people who hold such beliefs are stupid.
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i think people who beleived in the ark and a 6000 year old earth are not crazy just fucking stupid. i mean is someone crazy that beleifs in aliens according to the dsm-4 no, they are just juvenile like toxy.
the may be more brainwashed then anything.
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Many very smart atheists have allowed their intelligence to talk themselves right out of God's Kingdom.
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Many very smart atheists have allowed their intelligence to talk themselves right out of God's Kingdom.
Ding! :) So true.
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Boom!
http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence#_note-0
There's a correlation between being less religious and intelligence.. Backed up by sample statistics.
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So there are some "exceptions" on this board! ;D
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So there are some "exceptions" on this board! ;D
religion and intelligence maybe, but spirituality and intelligence would show a different story imo..
america is generally wrong with respect to everything, there philosophies, way of living, food everything. they have poor health, high obesity, high stress, imo the whole lifestyle is wrong.mysticism is were its at, i beleive the truth to be there, not in the bible or some other borrowed religions.
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religion and intelligence maybe, but spirituality and intelligence would show a different story imo..
america is generally wrong with respect to everything, there philosophies, way of living, food everything. they have poor health, high obesity, high stress, imo the whole lifestyle is wrong.mysticism is were its at, i beleive the truth to be there, not in the bible or some other borrowed religions.
I agree. We are, as a race, in a spiritual evolution. At some point soon, it will be commonly accepted by all but the very stubborn few, that these writings contain only parts of the truth and none of them contain the whole truth.
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I agree. We are, as a race, in a spiritual evolution. At some point soon, it will be commonly accepted by all but the very stubborn few, that these writings contain only parts of the truth and none of them contain the whole truth.
You think? I haven't looked at nationwide numbers, but I think "organized religion" has been growing. Maybe it's just me, but it appears as though church growth has been expanding all over the place.
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You think? I haven't looked at nationwide numbers, but I think "organized religion" has been growing. Maybe it's just me, but it appears as though church growth has been expanding all over the place.
It would be interesting to see the real numbers. But, based on my experiences, more people in the last 50 years see the Bible for what it is rather then what they believe it to be.
Spiritual evolution much like anything else doesn't move it a constant direction. but it's overall direction is clear over a period of 100's of years.
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From another board/forum:
what annoys the hell out of me is people who loudly proclaim the non existence of God and ridicule those who choose to rely on faith ...
I find that the people who are devout on Sunday mornings and then heathens the other 164 hours of the week equally annoying.
With these I agree.
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Christopher Michael Langan has the highest I.Q in the U.S(190+), and he believes in God. However, his argument for the belief in God is so extraordinarily intellectually sophisticated that theists would be disappointed, because the kind of God that he believes in is not teleological at all, but a kind of dynamic process of identification and definition. He bases it on the self-containment paradox, which has troubled mathematicians for centuries, and he argues that the only way to understand God is to assume that logic plays the same role in reality as axioms in mathematics., and that reality itself is more a matter of perception, which is tied in definition, then really of inductive and deductive logic. Everyone who tries to challenge him gets owned, even Nobelists in physics, because the man has a brain roughly twice the size of a normal person.
SUCKMYMUSCLE
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Christopher Michael Langan has the highest I.Q in the U.S(190+), and he believes in God. However, his argument for the belief in God is so extraordinarily intellectually sophisticated that theists would be disappointed, because the kind of God that he believes in is not teleological at all, but a kind of dynamic process of identification and definition. He bases it on the self-containment paradox, which has troubled mathematicians for centuries, and he argues that the only way to understand God is to assume that logic plays the same role in reality as axioms in mathematics., and that reality itself is more a matter of perception, which is tied in definition, then really of inductive and deductive logic. Everyone who tries to challenge him gets owned, even Nobelists in physics, because the man has a brain roughly twice the size of a normal person.
SUCKMYMUSCLE
I like this guy! ;D
Langan was born in San Francisco and spent most of his early life in Montana. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy shipping executive but was cut off from her family; his father died or disappeared before he was born.[5] He began talking at six months, taught himself to read before he was four, and was repeatedly skipped ahead in school.[6]
But he grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by his stepfather from when he was almost six to when he was about fourteen.[7] By then Langan had begun weight training, and forcibly ended the abuse, throwing his stepfather out of the house and telling him never to return.[8]
Langan has claimed that "you can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics."[7]
Langan is a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID),[19] a professional society which promotes intelligent design,[20] and has published a paper on his CTMU in the society's online journal Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design in 2002.[21] Later that year, he presented a lecture on his CTMU at ISCID's Research and Progress in Intelligent Design (RAPID) conference.[22] In 2004, Langan contributed a chapter to Uncommon Dissent, an essay collection of works that question Darwinian evolution edited by ISCID cofounder and leading intelligent design proponent William Dembski.[23]
Asked about creationism, Langan has said:
"I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible."[14]
Langan has said he does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let [his] logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma."[14] He calls himself "a respecter of all faiths, among peoples everywhere."[14]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Michael_Langan#Life
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Christopher Michael Langan has the highest I.Q in the U.S(190+), and he believes in God. However, his argument for the belief in God is so extraordinarily intellectually sophisticated that theists would be disappointed, because the kind of God that he believes in is not teleological at all, but a kind of dynamic process of identification and definition. He bases it on the self-containment paradox, which has troubled mathematicians for centuries, and he argues that the only way to understand God is to assume that logic plays the same role in reality as axioms in mathematics., and that reality itself is more a matter of perception, which is tied in definition, then really of inductive and deductive logic. Everyone who tries to challenge him gets owned, even Nobelists in physics, because the man has a brain roughly twice the size of a normal person.
SUCKMYMUSCLE
sucky expand on langhans views if you would, i reckon you've read most of his works and have a good grasp on it.
is his god benevolent, or is god the system ie pantheism?
thanks.
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sucky expand on langhans views if you would, i reckon you've read most of his works and have a good grasp on it.
is his god benevolent, or is god the system ie pantheism?
thanks.
Langan postulates that God is an interchangeable term with reality. Assume the premisse "reality contains all that is real". Of course, this is a tautology, but a necessary one if we are to deduce the properties of reality. Langan expands the paradox of the self-containing set - the set that contains all sets but cannot be contained by any set - , which is one of the three great unsolved paradoxes of mathematics - the other two being the Riemann Hypothesis and whether prime numbers are infinite or not.
Since reality contains all that is real, then it is impossible to use inductive logic to infer all of reality, because causality itself is a limited property of reality, and thus can only explain part of it. If logic cannot explain all of reality, then what is logic? According to Langan, logic and causality are forms of perceptions between given particles of reality. In this context, the word "particle" is not used to categorize actual physical particles, but specific factors of reality that play the same role as the factors in mathematics.
We thus perceive reality in a specific way because our senses are limited, and they are limited because our senses are themselves the result of physical pocesses that interact in a specific way. This goes back to Aristotle, who postulated that our senses can only perceive parts of reality because they are bound to the rules of reality itself.
So reality has a lot to do with mathematics in the sense that both are axiomatically closed systems, and that all interaction between properties of the system are bound or "closed" and only have intrinsec meaning in the context of the system. Going by this, then there are infinite universes, all based on different axioms, and they are infinite because they are based on the ultimate premisse that reality contains containment itself, and thus cannot be contained by anything. Thus, the mathemactical concept of limit does not apply to reality at all.
This creates, according to Langan, even more startling deductions. Since reality contains all that is real, and since nothing can "escape" reality as whole, then a Human Being's conscience, feeelings continue to exist somehow after death, and, just like the matter that composes the physical body is re-integrated into the physical world, so are a person's thought, experiences and self-consciousness "recycled" through reality after the person dies.
So whya re there intelligent beings? Langan claims that all beings are "sensors" that reality(God) uses to evaluate itself and evolve. Since more intelligent beings posses a more refined comprehension of reality and a greater capacity to interfer with it than less intelligetn beings, then this is why the lives of more intelligent beings have more value than the lives of less intellient beings. This is why murdering a Human Being is a much, much graver offense than murdering a pig or a cow: you are eliminating a "sensor" that has more global value in the interpretation and evolution of reality than the other sensor. When asked if this means that high I.Q people have more value than low I.Q people, Langan replied that high I.Q people have more "contextual" value, but not more intrinsec value. He gave the example that the assassination of Einstein would represent a much greater loss to the comprehension and evolution of reality itself than the assassination of a street bum. The concept of value itself is tied with Darwinian evolution, and has no greater meaning outside of it. This brings us to carma. According to Langan, when you murder a Human Being, you suffer a great immediate de-valuement, because you have eliminated a sensor that reality uses to evolve itself. God hates that, and he renders the offender incapable of doing that again by limiting his capacity after death. Reincarantion as a lower being or being put in a state of stasis is one of the ways he does that. He does not do this to "punish" the offender, as the concept of punishment is primitive and lower than God: he does it to eliminate someone who is stopping his own comprehension and evolution.
So, according to Langan, there are not only souls, but also intelligent entities spread across all of reality. There might be beings that are so hyper-evolved that they comprehend and are 99.9999999999%+ as powerful as God. These beings might be so hyper-evolved and god-like that they might exist beyond time-space and have the capacity to manufacture entire universes from scratch. However, no matter how god-like they become, they will never be 100% of God, because that would represent a breach of the self-containment principle, which all reality is based upon. Since reality contains all that is real, then there is only one reality and one God, and these hyper-advanced entities are still contained by reality. becoming 100% like God would mean that they have become different realities, and reality, by definition, contains all and is not contained by anything.
I personally am an atheist, because I believe that there are a billion more interesting explanations for explaining the ultimate nature of reality than a creator God. Like Richard Dawkins said, accepting there reality results from a creator God is creating far more problems then the ones you're trying to explain. But in any case, Langan has so far provided the best support for theism that I have come across. Like I said, his theistic explanation for reality is so incredibly high-brow that it is unappealing for most religious people. As Langan himself has said "religion is God for still un-evolved sensors". Such is the World...
SUCKMYMUSCLE
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No, just conditioned differently.