Jason Sorens, an editor of the website Pileus has offered a challenge to thinking conservatives. Essentially, he claims such a beast is rarer than rare. His post is worth reading.
http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/atheists-are-just-smarter/
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I read his post, and find his argument rather silly. I've heard enough silly, down right asinine things believed by liberals and atheists to know otherwise. This is just the same old thing of people who already believe they are smarter than others, patting themselves on the back, "See I told you we were smarter than they are" It would be interesting to see the political beliefs of the people who gave the tests, and did the research. I bet if conservatives came up with such a study, liberals would come out "slightly dummer" than conservatives are too. Take such studies with a grain of salt.
Whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics. How far does he want to go along that route? I’ve also seen studies that say conservatives are more charitable. Does that mean that intelligence makes you less compassionate?
Anyway, the preferences of a slightly more intelligent minority mean nothing compared to the actions of a majority with no abiding principles.
The few surveys I’ve read that claim leftists are brighter use incredibly silly proxies for intelligence, and exhibit confirmation bias more strongly than anything else.
However, there are some sound reasons that we should expect the more intelligent lot in the US and the UK to have fewer religious among them. Only, none of those reasons have to do with the leftists making more intelligent choices.
Here are a few factors:
(1) Social pressure: there is simply no tolerance for religious views among the intelligentsia — people who wear their erudition like a badge. Anybody who values that social setting experiences very strong pressure to abandon their religious faith in order to be accepted by the group. Young people clearly value the opinion of the intelligentsia higher than more mature people do. So bright young people who want to look smart find themselves more frequently in settings where they are encouraged (an understatement) to renounce their faith, and many of them do. Voila! Over time, more intelligent people have fewer religious among them.
(2) Leftward bias of educators:
(A) Surveys of the beliefs of professors at major universities show that there are almost 100 leftists for every conservative. That’s not because conservatives don’t want to teach, it’s because leftists only hire their own kind, and have done for about 80 years. So every student who attends university gets exposed to strong, leftward bias (another understatement. Some professors actively attempt to shame religious students into abandoning their religion.) And since the most intelligent students are the ones who attend university…voila! Over time, more intelligent people have fewer religious among them.
(B) The public school system is dominated and run by social and political progressives. Their attitudes appear clearly and disproportionately in the materials written for the elementary and secondary grades. The more attention paid to educational materials, the more the children absorb the biases — during years when they are unable to detect and filter out biases. The less intelligent students pay less attention to the material, and have less need for it, so are less affected by it. Voila! Over time, more intelligent people have fewer religious among them.
That’s just off the top of my head.
Of course, we could simply accept the understated self-congratulation of the intelligent leftists themselves, as they make self-adoring references to their own tolerance and intellectual flexibility. Only, those of us who who disagree with these same leftists, wonder how it is that folks who possess such flexible intellects all manage to end up using exactly the same catch-phrases to say exactly the same things as the next flexible intellect. And since we also have discovered that the reflexive response of these tolerant, flexible individuals to hearing disagreement always involves references to fascists and rednecks, we know precisely how much stock to place in explanations that make reference to their open minds and tolerant attitudes.