“We call believers who have this perspective ‘most Christians.’”

If any sane, conscious human being honestly takes the Bible literally, they’re…well, not sane or conscious. I don’t just mean the fairy-tale bits, but I refer to the deluge of contradictions (pun intended). I really don’t want to seem elitist, but these people cannot possibly have anything more than sub-human intelligence. They can’t possibly have one bit of reading comprehension. There is no arguing this point. ”

Don’t worry DUB, you have no chance of seeming elitist or intellectual for that matter. Especially when you make uninformed statements claiming atheists are smart and Christians have ’sub-human intellegence’. The reality is that both quantitative and qualitative studies conducted by both atheists and Christians alike prove that in reality (not your fantasy world) Christians are smarter, physically healthier and more emotionally stable. But don’t take my word for it check out the evidence:

An evaluation of Atheist Claims
Who is Smarter?

There is actually a website which tries to argue that non-religious people are smarter than religious people, and that this should be a valid criterion for determining the truth! This is such an amusing argument, because to argue it is to demonstrate the opposite of the case. It’s really just an appeal to authority, and is aimed at bolstering the fragile ego of certain atheist types, and to dismiss thinking so that one need not engage in such a messy pursuit.

1) Pratt (1937) among 3040 students at regional state college, taking denominational affiliation as sign of religiosity, “found that non-affiliates recorded lower mean scores on the American council Examination than any students affiliated to any denominational group.”

2) Rummell (1934) also using denominational affiliation 1194 students at University of Missouri. “He found that non-affiliates recorded lower mean scores on his scholastic index compared with Methodists and Episcopalians.”

3) Corey (1940) 234 Freshmen University of Wisconsin positive correlation between scores on the Ohio State Psychological Examination and the Thurstone scale of attitude toward God. “‘The more intelligent were more favorably inclined toward God.’”

4) Kosa and Schomer (1961) 362 students at a Catholic undergraduate college: taking participation in campus religious activities as scale of religious attitude “intensive participants recorded significantly higher scores than non-participates on OSU aptitude Test and OSR reading comprehension test.

c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service
“Several recent surveys of American college professors, …, show that professors are almost as likely to express a belief in God as are Americans as a whole.”

Just for the thrill of it, here’s my list of recent nobel science winners who are Christians:

The scientific fraternity conducted a poll and found that on any given Sunday 46% of Ph.D. holders in science can be found in church. That compares with 47% for the general population (in Alan Lightman Origins: The Lives and World of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard University press, 19990).

Fritz Shafer, nominated for Nobel Prize in Chemistry, University of Georgia, himself a Christian: “it is very rare that a physical scientists is truly an atheist.”Martin Rees at Cambridge: “The possibility of life as we know it depends upon a few basic values which are constants. And it is in some aspect remarkably sensitive to their heir numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences.”

Charlie Towns, Nobel prize winner: “The question of science seems to be unanswered if we explore from science alone. Thus I believe there is a need for some metaphysical or religious explanation. I believe in the concept of God an in his existence.”

Arthur Schewhow, Nobel prize winner from Stanford, identifies himself as a Christian, “We are fortunate to have the Bible which tells us so much about God in widely accessible terms.”

John Pokingham, theoretical physicist at Cambridge, left physics to become a minister. “I believe that God exists and has made himself known in Jesus Christ.”

The world’s greatest observational cosmologist Alan Sandage, Caregie observatories, won a prize given by Swedish parliament equivalent to Nobel prize (there is no Nobel prize for cosmology) became a Christian after being a scientist, “The nature of God is not found in any part of science, for that we must turn to the scriptures.”

http://www.geocities.com/meta_crock/other/smarter.htm

University of Cincinnati professor George Bishop conducted an extensive cross-national study of attitudes, and initially presented his findings at the May conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

“Nearly a third of college graduates in recent Gallup polls still believe in the biblical account of creation,” and that about 45% believe that God created human beings “pretty much in (their) present form at one time or another within the last 10,000.”

39% believe in a form of so-called “theistic evolution,” where evolutionary processes developed over millions of years but were “guided” by God.
Only about 10% subscribe to evolution without any form of divine guidance or intervention as an explanation of how life began.
And the creationist message is often couched in scientific terminology, and concentrates on areas which its supporters claim expose deficiencies in Darwinian evolution. Ken Hamm of the Answers in Genesis group told the Post, “I believe that when people are taught science correctly, they see that evolution is just a belief and not a scientific fact.”
http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/evol4.htm
Stategy & Tactics: Religion and economic attitudes
By: Luigi Zingales
August 2, 2004, The Edge Singapore
Economists, sociologists and political scientists have long been interested in explaining the economic success of certain countries and the persistent poverty of others.

The first, and most famous example, is the German sociologist Max Weber. In his 1905 treatise, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Weber attributes the emergence of capitalism to the Protestant doctrine of salvation and concept of good works.

Though the original debate centred on the economic virtues of Protestantism versus Catholicism, today’s debate encompasses the economic effect of all major religions.

In a new study, “People’s Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes”, Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Luigi Guiso of the University of Sassari, Italy, and Paolo Sapienza of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management take a new approach to answering the question of whether religion has an impact on a country’s economic development.

Previous research on this topic has focused on cross-country studies. The problem with this approach, however, is the difficulty of distinguishing between effects that are specific to religion and those that are specific to the country.

Zingales, Guiso and Sapienza’s new approach focuses on the differences in religion within a given country, pooled across 66 countries. In doing so they eliminate the spurious effect of other environmental variables and can focus on the link between religion and attitudes, such as trust, that have been found to be conducive to economic growth.

The authors find that religious beliefs are generally associated with “good” economic attitudes, where “good” is defined as attitudes conducive to higher per capita income and growth. Religious people tend to trust others more, trust the government and legal system more, are less willing to break the law, and are more likely to believe that markets’ outcomes are fair. There are exceptions, however. Religious people tend to be more racist and less favourable to the rights of working women.
Results are generally the opposite for self-proclaimed atheists: They are more tolerant of others; less trusting of the government and the police; have more progressive attitudes towards working women; trust the legal system less; are more willing to break the law; and have worse attitudes towards the market and its perceived fairness.
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/news/hits/040802es.htm
The Religious Attitudes and Beliefs
of University Professors
David W. Richardson, Jr.
MTh. University of Oxford
(Draft based on the Power-point presentation)
Faculty Religious Demographics
General American Population
• 94% (Gallup), 95% (Barna) believe in God.
• 68% believe in God when described as the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect Creator of the universe who rules the world today.
• 40% describe themselves as born-again Christians.
• 5-7% are agnostics and atheists.
Religious Representation of the General Population in American Universities
Professors General Public
Protestant 66% *) 63%
Catholic 18% 27%
Jewish 9% 3%
Other 4% 4%
No religious history 3% 3%
http://chfpn.pl/index/?id=aa169b49b583a2b5af89203c2b78c67c
Are Atheists More Depressed than Religious People?
A new study tells the tale
by Franz Buggle et al.
________________________________________
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 20, Number 4.
________________________________________
In recent years, the view that religious belief and participation in religious acts of worship has a positive effect upon the well-being of man has repeatedly been publicized in the German-speaking sphere by high-circulation magazines such as Der Spiegel and popular-science periodicals like Psychologie Heute, which cite epidemiological inquiries and quantitative research. These articles also suggest that religious people are able to cope with crises in their lives, with stress and psycho-social conflicts, more easily and develop highly effective coping strategies; moreover, they state that faith has a positive effect upon psychological and even physical health. A mass inquiry conducted in 1992 among members of the two major churches in Germany (Roman Catholic and Lutheran Protestant), for example, revealed that self-perceived satisfaction with life was more than 10% higher among regular church-goers than among those who do not go to church. This statement, among others, seemed to confirm the results of previous extensive studies, all of them suggesting that devout and practicing adherents of a religion were generally less prone to depression than persons who were brought up in religious faith but had turned away from church later in their lives. Other inquiries that were conducted among smaller populations, too, lead to the assumption “that religion has a slight positive sum effect on self-perceptions of happiness.” In his essay “Can Religion Make You Happy?” (FI, Summer 1998), John F. Schumaker gives a survey of seven quantitative studies dealing directly with the two variables and of 20 others that operated with components of “happiness,” all of them rendering more or less the same results.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=buggle_20_4

What on Earth is a “Christian Deist?” Try as I might I can make absolutely no sense of that.

As a former Deist, I familiarized myself quite thoroughly with the history and essentials of the “religion”. That said, I really can’t see the two mixing - especially since so many of the most outspoken of Deists made statements about xianity that weren’t exactly flattering.

(I am familiar with a certain ex-minister who attempted to create a hybrid of the two, calling it xian Deism, and writing volumes about it on a wesbsite. His was a pretty novel approach to Deism though (actually more novel than his approach to xianity).

Second, has anyone taken into account the fact that the bible(new testament) was transcribed by hand for 1500 years (just multiply that number for the old testament)? And that during those 1500, the beverage of choice was alcoholic in nature (wine, beer, liquor), since it was generally safer to drink then the water. Also, many monastaries (at least the most successful ones) raised funds by producing alcoholic beverages.

Now, taking the above into account, how infallible should we view the beybull(I love that by the way)? And how seriously are we to take all the important stylistic differences being as how the book was copied by hand by borderline (at best, more likely full blown) alcoholics for 1500 years?

I’ll be the first to admit that Jefferson was smarter than Jesus. Would you say the same thing?

Now if you guys are saying you are intellectually superior to Jefferson because you have decided to take the whole bible literally - then excuse me if I find that laughable.

I find your logic laughable.

At a 1934 conference, Einstein said, “. . . teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God . . .”

Have you given up the idea of a personal God? No! You mean you are intellectually superior to Einstein!?

Do you believe the founder of your religion practiced the same hermeneutic that you do? If not are you a better representative of true Christianity than Christ?