Why Atheists are Probably Smarter: Zero Dogma Tolerance
Are Atheists Smarter?
People get smarter over time - the Flynn effect and for more than a millennium, scientists have observed a positive correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.
Some components in religion show up to combat with scientific principles, and we now regularly live in highly technological societies.
Religiosity correlates with degrees of violence, even though normally, religions implore people not to be violent.
I would assume that’s partly because people dwelling in extra-violent areas have a tendency to feel more of a need for a strongly cohesive moral framework, and the encouragement that spiritual corporations can provide.
A psychological trait regarded as “openness to experience” appears to be correlated with intelligence, and people who are very open to new experiences are accountable to react negatively to religious dogma. They often choose to think independently rather than just be part of the dumb flock.
They seem quite in all likelihood to react negatively to extraordinarily dogmatic forms of atheism, and the Internet has allowed a form of atheism that goes nicely past truly not believing in God to arise.
Those people (“New Atheists”) describe themselves as atheists but have a discernibly shared set of beliefs that go past that, but also the concept that non-secular people are all idiots.
That is a dogmatic mindset in an atheistic way, which makes it even more difficult to rashly draw a logical inference of intelligent-atheism positive relationship, absolutely.
Viewing atheists collectively with religious believers, people might discover intelligence to be negatively correlated with religiosity (a form of dogmatism).
However, the question of whether or not highly dogmatic atheists are also on average less intelligent than less dogmatic atheists (who might, for instance, think about religion to be a bit like a kind of remedy that works for some humans but has side-effects as well, rather than taking a black-and-white damn-it-all-to-hell type attitude) has not been explored widely, as it seems there aren't enough publications on this.
The thing with atheists is that they have a tendency to prefer higher stages of scientific proof for matters than religious people.
But it’s very effortless to assemble theories that sound scientific or extraordinarily logical and aren’t, and there would appear to be a danger of atheists being convinced by means of those when some religious framework or other might conceivably have protected them from being satisfied with ill-founded but scientific-sounding ideas.
Eugenics is perhaps an example, with a whole lot of opposition stemming from religion. Marxism marketed itself as scientific economics, and certainly many atheists fell for that one, with disastrous results.
It’s scarcely viable to overestimate the degree of irrationality that human beings are all prone to, and it would be a mistake for people to imagine that believing or not believing in one specific thing, or one particular set of things, would guarantee them anything more than merely the phantasm of rationality.
If this sounds like a cynical view of human nature, well, you might hardly ever see how all of us ought to be familiar with the history of irrational beliefs diffusion even when it claimed to be based on science and yet still think that something can guarantee us immunity to irrationality.
The history of the United Kingdom and of the United States of America are both microcosms of a process, and each country shed much blood before figuring out how to establish tolerant and fairly secure societies with various kinds of religious belief, and later a great deal of atheism, may want to continue to exist on the same piece of land. The same is true of very many other countries.
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