The thing that cracks me up is that I am way more intelligent than the poster AND his wife. Combined.

It was posted with the comment ::pulls pin and throws grenade:: which tells me (being of the intelligent sort) that it was posted to be purely incendiary. And so to that, I say "God Bless his little heart" (being of the religious sort).

Well, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find that the specific set of atheists - i.e. those who have examined their ideas and beliefs, and who have used their intellects to decide that they believe there is no God - do, in fact, have a higher mean IQ than "religious people" given that it is entirely possible to include every level of belief, from the most casually unexamined to the passionately engaged who use their full intellect and have come to faith with their minds and eyes open. I doubt that most people who don't really believe much of anything because they haven't bothered to examine what they do believe will admit it - many of them will identify with generic social levels of religion, simply because they have not bothered to really think anything. The IQ of "religious" people will also skew lower due to the inclusion of those subsets of "religious" cultures who value anti-intellectualism, and avoid education. I do wonder, though, just how big the difference in mean IQ between atheists and religious people who have spent as much time examining their faith as the atheists spend examining their ideas.

Aims,

and from what I understand the article is a bit of a mis-statement. Not to mention, I give a serious side eye to "intelligence" tests and most intelligent people do the same. There is a lot of measurement error in intelligence tests (e.g. what is it really measuring?)

In my field, working with adults with intellectual disabilities, there are people whose parents raised them in a faith, and therefore they identify as religious. To the extent that they express any interest in it, we support them in attending services and participating in other activities to do with their religion. (You should see us Christians scrambling to try to figure out how to not completely desecrate Jewish dietary customs on certain feast days WHEN we remember them... ) There are plenty of individuals who have no particular faith, or no particular interest in any form of religious activity, but they don't exactly get identified as atheists. I doubt that any "study", even the most carefully designed one, will take that into account.

There is a lot of measurement error in intelligence tests (e.g. what is it really measuring?)

Precisely. Psychological measurement is a bit of a crap shoot, trying to measure intangibles. You can't measure intelligence directly. You can measure behaviors such as answering test questions, and you can assume that intelligent people answer more test questions correctly than less intelligent people do, but since it is not a direct measure, there are so many possibilities for confounding factors putting spanners in the works.

What I find interesting is that in the article it basically says that since religion can't be tested, intelligent people don't buy it (total paraphrase). Since yeah - religious belief can't be quantitatively measured, how can you compare it to something that (theoretically) can?

Furthermore, I would like to see a breakdown of intelligence as it relates to socioeconomic status and urban vs. rural living.

It's an interesting subject to me. But one, I think, that does not lend itself to black and white. There are so many shades of gray (more than 50, thankyewverymuch).

Speaking personally, I was raised in a more agnostic household than atheist and we were encouraged to explore our interests in religion, if we had any. I did. I did some searching and research and I came to the conclusion that religion comforts me. It gives me something more to count on. It's been invaluable to me over the past year and without it, I honestly don't know where I'd be. It was the driving force in my choice to get baptized this year. And I'm pretty damned intelligent.

What I find interesting is that in the article it basically says that since religion can't be tested, intelligent people don't buy it (total paraphrase). Since yeah - religious belief can't be quantitatively measured, how can you compare it to something that (theoretically) can?

Oh for a time machine. Wouldn't it be splendid fun to put the author of this article in a room with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis?

Oh, it would.

I consider myself religious, but it's a very personal, considered religion. I define "religion" as "a person's relationship with the eternal/the cosmos/whatever's out there." It should be something acquired after contemplation and study and honest consideration of what's inside one's head. Maybe your parents' religion fits that bill, more power to you, peace be unto you. That discipline of thought, though, is not something most people can do, to my mind. For some, it's simpler to just accept the Religion Packet they were handed as a kid and not spend any more effort on it.

I would like to see a breakdown of intelligence as it relates to socioeconomic status and urban vs. rural living.

Don't bother, it's not worth the further aggravation. There is a serious validity issue. With regard to racial differences, I talk about this to my class and go on a (at least) 2-week rant.