To Atheists...

hahahahaha

 

I was having a few months off.

This debate is still going on from the last thread?

 

If an-all powerful God controls Satan then he is an accomplice

If he doesn't control Satan, he isn't all-powerful

 

Nah, Gehenna just restarted the debate Monday.

 

Oh wow

 

hello everyone, i have an announcement to make

gehenna is either trolling or a literal retard

either way, his “beliefs” will not be changed by anything you say

LITERALLY ANYTHING

please just shut up before wasting your time like i did with the last thread

 

We're (or at least I am) not trying to change his beliefs, just questionning what makes him think that.

 

dont lol, if you get him in a corner with ANY kind of good point or whatever he will LITERALLY say something along the lines of “you dont really know that” or “god doesnt apply to that rule” or “gods word is final” because that is either what he honestly is brainwashed to believe or is a troll

please stop, you achieve NOTHING by arguing with someone religious

 

If he's a troll, that's actually amazing, years and years of trolling people, that's ultimate-boss-of-trolls level.

(and we're achieving better understanding of how someone religious thinks, quite useful if you want to counter it)

 

no its not lol, he will just double down on "you cant prove god doesnt exist so god is real and babies go to hell"

its a huge waste of time to post on this thread

 

it reaaally sounds like you are making this all up lol like "dark forces of the earth" "god can control him and any human but he wont" ... wut? how u know that? that aint no fact

 

People here play Minecraft, that's a waste of time, but we enjoy playing it. Same here, if you think discussing is a waste of time, well I won't say you're wrong, but people here enjoy debating.
And I think you missed my point here, I wasn't saying I wanted to counter gehenna's beliefs, it's pretty much a lost cause. But by getting a better understanding of what's in the mind of a religious, we can prevent some younger people from retreating in religion. So stop saying "he's not going to change opinion, you're wasting your time here" because, for the second time, that's not our goal.
I know it was from a good intention, but please, if you don't want to participate, at least leave people discuss here.

 

IQ tests are, on the whole, a very bad way of measuring intelligence. Actual IQ tests take around six hours, often paired with other tests (working/short-term/long-term memory, and the likes), and test in large part pattern-based cognition. The only factors they take into account are how well you score on each of the tests and age, and as such education has every impact on your IQ test results imaginable.
Don't get me wrong, there's more than epigenetics that goes into an IQ test, but education is a huge factor. Someone who doesn't go to school for much of their life cannot and will not score, on average, as well as someone who does. IQ tests are not a test of your ability to learn things, or tests how smart you are, but rather tests of how much you've already learned and remembered.

There is no section (that I can remember) on IQ tests that assess your ability to make logical conclusions from data sets, or to come to even your own conclusions about anything. There's some math of varying difficulty (although I can't remember the upper limit of difficulty, it was definitely well above what eighth grade me was ever taught), but it's far from actually thinking for yourself. The closest thing to logic on the test is the pattern continuation, but that's not exactly very intense in quite the same logic department.

People give a lot more credit to IQ tests than they should. While it's a solid test, its results are way too often applied in ways they shouldn't be.

 

Ok this is going to be a long reply lol, sorry for that ...

I did some research on the map and the document Knaber linked, and these studies are partially flawed.
I found that quite disturbing but didn't posted it since it's off topic, but since the topic has been brought back...

So, the map uses data from a study conducted by Richard Lynn, who suggested that the low level of economic development were caused by low IQs in sub-Saharan countries.
But Lynn used selective data by systematically ignoring Africans with high IQ scores.
Ignoring very high values is frequently done for instance when economists study an environement with a few very rich and a few very poor people, to avoid these extremes values from parasitize the data.
But here we're talking about diferences of ~50% to the median IQ, not like the thousands of percents we can see in an economical study, so the data isn't "parasitized" by these high values, and the choice of ignoring high IQs for African countries wasn't supported by any statistic procedure. Furthermore, he did include very low values, which changed even more the outcome.
The revised value resulted in average IQ of 82 for sub-Saharan Africa, which Lynn estimated at 67, that's a 20% increase.
But 82 is still lower than the ~100 of Western countries' average. To put this in perspective, Lynn used Raven's Progressive Matrices to measure IQ, which is the method marking the most differences between IQs.
This method observed in Europe a gain of ~25% of IQ (from 100 to an equivalent of 125) on the 40 years preceding the study.
So the IQ in sub-Saharan countries is "comparable" to the IQ in Europe in 1980, which is not that much of a difference after all. And since the environment of Africa and Europe are very different (which has an impact on IQ), this difference is understandable.

Conserning the article linked, it is the result of a study using exactly the same techniques: Excluding Africans in Faculties from the data and using Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (which, I agree, is understandable in the case of a study, but can be quite misleading) to mark more differences.

And concerning the impact of genetics on IQs, this theory is rejected by pretty much all psychometric specialists, but part of it is due to the fact that it encourages racism.
So I really don't know what to think of it, I would just avoid to present it as a fact as knaber did.

But I don't want this thread to go full freestyle so we might get back to the topic.

So back on religion, the map Knaber linked was "showing" that countries with higher IQs were the less religious.
It caught my interest, and since I could not use the map, because it was flawed, I did my own research.
I found studies on correlation between IQ and religiousness. I was really surprised to see that more than 90% of the studies found a negative correlation (negative correlation: the higher the religiousness, the lower the IQ), and a significative correlation at that (according to the articles, I couldn't find the average correlation coefficient). The difference isn't as significative tho, it's a difference of ~5 between the self identified "very religious" and the "non religious".
But do not establish a causality link too fast with this info, they are correlated, that doesn't mean that people have lower IQ because of religion. They might be (and certainly are) affected by the same factors.

This is quite a delicate subject so I really hope I didn't say some dumb things... feel free to correct me.

 

1. So... God views sinful humans as garbage??? Not sure what you're getting at here
2. So he's not controlling my mind... He's just reading it and then decided whether or not to throw me into Hell based on my private thoughts. And that's OK??
3. God has never broken a promise... Well which promises has he made that have been kept? Outside of the ones in the Bible because as we said, we have no way of verifying if the Bible is true.
You have a fetishization of faith and not basing stuff on evidence and you gotta stop. Gehenna, listen to me. If you base your beliefs on something other than evidence, than they have NO connection to reality. Do you actually not care what is real and what isn't, or would you rather just be an ignorant moron?

So God can control Satan but he doesn't. Which begs the question; why? If Satan is the evil guy who's responsible for a lot of bad stuff, then it's God's responsibility to fix it because God created him. God isn't fixing it - so is God just lazy? Laziness is incompatible with omnipotence btw. Or does he not care?

 

Well, more of a "lower IQ causes more religion" than "religion causes lower IQ" (well at least easier to convert perhaps)

Oy vey!!

 

gehenna basically thinks that all the good parts of the world are God's work and all the bad parts are our fault or the Devil's fault lol

it'd be one thing to believe in God and actually acknowledge that according to HIS OWN SCRIPTURE, God is heavily flawed. But the fact that he's completely unwilling to acknowledge even the slightest hint of imperfection makes me think that he's basically been brainwashed. It's sad, but it's what happens in religion all too often. It's like stockholm syndrome, but for an imaginary friend.

gehenna you gotta stop, I know deep down a part of you knows that this is bull****.