Monday, December 22, 2008

Science proves Anglicans smartest

From The Guardian and a candidate for the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Department.

OK, it's a naughty headline, but no less true than the one put on this survey at the aggressively atheist Sandwalk blog, which said "Atheists are smarter than agnostics". Both readings are justified. A large-scale analysis of the religious allegiance and measured IQ of a representative sample of 3,742 American adolescents found a clear trend: the more fundamentalist denominations had the more stupid believers, so that the bottom four places were occupied, from the bottom, by Pentecostalists, Baptists, Holiness churches and "Personal Philosophy", which I presume means a new-age-ish syncretism, while the top four places, again in ascending order, were taken by agnostics, atheists, Jews, and Episcopalians (Anglicans). So, atheists are smarter than agnostics, Jews are smarter than atheists, and Anglicans the smartest of the lot ...

But we should always be careful about science which tells us what we think we already know.

It's all here-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2008/dec/19/religion-iq-atheism

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