IQ and JWs (page 2)

Freedomrules

wait. Sex outside of marriage is bad? oops

I don't want to stereotype, as I'm sure there are some intelligent people in the organization. But, I can say that in my husband's particular congregation, I have talked to many, many people and I would estimate that the average IQ is far less than average (100). It could possibly be the area, but don't you have to wonder about limiting the gene pool like they do? My theory is that the dummies in this congregation will produce exponentially dumber offspring. Just my opinion.

drwtsn32

wait. Sex outside of marriage is bad? oops

lol. Yep, even the kind of sex that's between you and yourself. It's all a lure of the devil!!

Francois

I believe that, in general, your assertion is correct. I will use the congregation I was in as an example, cause it's the best example I've got.

In this congregation we had a guy who graduated Ga Tech in physics with a 4.0; We had another guy who was brilliant but who was not "allowed" to go to college; we had me; we had one of those guys from the cartoons who always got sand kicked in his face before he took the Charles Atlas body building course. This was the entire "intelligensia" of the congregation. The rest of the congregation hardly had sense enough to come in out of the rain.

Three of the four mentioned above all left da troof in the same year. The skinny guy who got the sand, etc. stayed in because he was an elder and that was the only thing in his life that validated him.

On the other hand, my uncle was a congregation servant in the days prior to the elder arrangement, and has been an elder ever since. He is a research associate at Eastman Chemicals - an intelligent man; book smart but doesn't have the street smarts of a brick. Why does he stay in? See paragraph above.

I firmly believe that religion, especially cultic religion is an emotional phenomena, not an intellectual phenomena. It is, however, obviously easier to pull the wool over the eyes of a dummy than to do it to a person who has the lights on in his eyes denoting that someone in there is home.

francois

bittersweet

I know quite a few intelligent witnesses. I also know quite a few not so intelligent witnesses. IMHO, it's about 50/50.

shera

I remember during a talk,I can't remember excatly how he put it.He basically said its not good to be too smart within the organization,sometimes smart people can doubt things and make you read between the lines when it comes to scripture..it was on the lines of that.I recall it bothering me a great deal and I was thinking is he telling us its better to be dumb?

Sighhh,that darn org....makes me ill

RunningMan

There was a time when the most intelligent people in the world believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This incorrect belief did not mean they were stupid, it just meant that they didn't have access to quality information.

So, is there a correlation between intelligence and JWism? Well, yes there is, but it is not a direct correlation.

Intelligent people are generally more driven to become educated and to seek out accurate information. These are the ones that leave. So, you don't have to be dumb to be a JW, but it helps.

Will there come a time when there are no more intelligent JWs? No, with 6 million members, there should be 10s of thousands (or more) births every year. Plus, there will always be some intelligent persons who belong for some reason. Maybe the ideas satisfy a desire that they have, or maybe they belong for their family and relatives. God knows that enough JWs belong for that reason.

freedom96

Just having a high IQ does not mean that you are immune from cult like religions. I know many very intelligent witnesses. They simply do not think for themself when it comes to the Watchtower.

Oroborus21

If you were to conduct an Intelligence Quotient test (although these have their cultural biases) among all JWs I believe you would find a wide degree of results that pretty much mimics a similar sampling from society at large.

Intelligence is unrelated to occupation or even educational achievement.

Real intelligence is difficult to define? Do we include "common sense"? Do we include physical/motor skill and ability or athleticism? Certainly these require "intelligence" to excell at.

Do we measure mathmatical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, etc?

Jehovah's Witnesses is an "educational religion" which has at its core a set of skills and behaviours which could lead to a measured increase in "intelligence" in certain areas. So in some areas such as public speaking, reading comprehension, etc., JWs scores might as a whole even exceed a similar sample of the population.

Some here would argue that in other areas, such as "critical thinking", JWs scores might be lower--but I doubt it.

To address some points made by others, I don't think we could say that an "above average" or highly intelligent individual is likely to leave the Organization, because the choice to become or remain a member is complex and only partially depends upon logical, mental or intelligent processes.

True, the assumption is that a highly intelligent person is more likely to recognize and comprehend errors in logic and reasoning then a person of "lesser intelligence" and thus some here may argue that these highly intelligent individuals are more likely to leave the Organization due to concerns over doctrine, etc.

But I am not sure there is enough empirical evidence to support such an assumption.

In any case, that was not your question, as you asked about JWs and their IQs, and it is evident that there are highly intelligent JWs and JWs of lesser intelligence that remain even in the face of having conflicts or problems with the Organization and the religion.

Interestingly, many here are fond of Cognitive Dissonance theory, I haven't seen any research that indicates that the results from tests of the theory show a disparate result between "highly intelligent persons" and those of "lesser intelligence." This suggest that the Cognitive Dissonance phenonmenon (if true) is independent of IQ.

Thus the further conclusion is that we could not assume that CDT would be more highly active or would lead to a greater amount of defections from the Organization on the part of "highly intelligent" persons.

--Eduardo

onacruse

In many ways, an "intellectual" person is perhaps more susceptible to the subtle, but emotionally powerful, effect of group-think. A term I can relate to is "analysis paralysis." A "dumb" person may accept the group-think because "everybody here is so much smarter than me." A "smart" person, even having clear evidence in hand, easily gets into the "the more I think about it, I'm still not absolutely sure they're wrong." Either way, it ends up being the heart, and circumstances, that decide.

Craig

IQ and JWs