When you’re raised in a fundamentalist religious society, people who end up questioning, and eventually rejecting, the worldview they were spoon-fed as children, tend to be more intelligent than the ones who do not. While the less intelligent ones will just keep swallowing it, hook, line and sinker… Which is why I think the average atheist, in strongly religious societies, tends to be more intelligent than the average theist.Then again… I’m European. I grew up in a society where religion was almost never mentioned, and where just about everyone around me was completely apathetic towards the God question. Most of my friends and family members are non-believers by default. So where I’m from, becoming an atheist is just NOT that sort of active, self-selecting process! It does not require any brains whatsoever! And the result is that we’ve got some very dumb atheists, as well as some very smart atheists, and of course everything in between… Which just goes to show that atheism, in and on itself, does NOT make people more intelligent.In fact, in my country, becoming spiritual or religious is usually what requires an active, deliberate search for answers and meaning! (Unless, of course, you’re one of those RARE few people that are still born into Christian, or otherwise religious, families…) And I won’t say anything about believers being more intelligent than non-believers here, because in all honesty, I don’t have those statistics. But.. it sure as hell would NOT surprise me if a sort of reverse filtering effect turned out to be happening around these parts! An effect where the more intelligent people are far more likely to actively think about the big questions in life, look beyond their lukewarm, apathetic, secular upbringings, and search for deeper answers elsewhere! Which would then make them more likely to find spirituality or religion of some kind… While the less intelligent people will see no need to question the way they were raised, and remain apathetic atheists by default for the rest of their lives. Kind of like how it happens in the US, just the other way around.So yeah… Based on experience, that’s how I see it. That intelligence makes people more likely to question the way they were raised, but it won’t necessarily propel them towards any one particular worldview. Except… maybe intelligent people will also be less likely to buy into fundamentalist, literalistic worldviews that repress freedom of thought, and that obviously contradict all the available scientific evidence.. I know I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I’m still a decently smart cookie, all the same. And I have NEVER been able to buy into Biblical literalism, or anything else that is obviously 100% contradicted and refuted by science....
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