- There seems to be, on average, a higher level of intelligence here than there is at the Kingdom Hall.
- Also, the simple language skills found here seem to be above average compared to those among the Witnesses. Some of the grammar here could use some polishing-up, but there is actually some substance to a lot of the thoughts presented.
First, intelligence and education are two different things. A person can have a high level of intelligence and still be illiterate. Intelligence is a measure of what a person is capable of understanding. Education is what a person has actually learned.
Leaving a cult doesn't mean you leave your education, or lack thereof, behind you. Some people find that they are free to learn more and not just about religious beliefs but about everything. That doesn't make them more intelligent than those they left behind.
I see a lot of people on this forum who seem to have traded one narrow-minded set of beliefs for a different set of narrow-minded beliefs. I see a lot of commentary that is ridiculously uneducated, especially since Google is free and readily available. We have more access to verifiable information and legitimate sources of information than we ever had before and yet a lot of people don't bother to look things up. Or they go to sources that tell them what they want to hear instead of the unbiased facts and well-rounded points of view.
I see a lot of people on this forum who worked really hard to become better educated. I see a lot of people who don't have a lot of education but are clearly smart. Their spelling and grammar might not be the best but they are clearly working hard with what they've got. And a lot of JWs never finish certain levels of schooling.
To me, this is exactly what I saw in the Kingdom Halls. I saw about 50% of people who were intelligent but uneducated. I saw a few people who were educated and intelligent, but they didn't stick around very long. I saw a good amount of people who were both uneducated and of low intelligence.
I think what you might be seeing is that the kind of people who leave the JWs tend to be people who want to be more educated, but also many of whom are of a higher intelligence (not higher than non-JWs, but higher than those JWs more likely to stick with the cult).
In my immediate family, the six of us are all very intelligent people. We don't all have book smarts but we are all smart in one way or another. My little sister is the only one of us kids who stayed in the cult. She went to college and she has a high level of intelligence. She has some very backwards beliefs which she gets to keep with the cult. She is one of the few people I know of who is both educated and highly intelligent and chose to stay in it. My mother is of good/average intelligence but she never finished high school. She doesn't think that she is intelligent or smart enough to survive in the world outside the cult. She has other reasons for staying but I know that plays a part as well. My little brother, my father, and my older sister are extremely intelligent people and they all went on to higher education. I am a very educated person but I'm pretty sure my intelligence quotient isn't anything to write home about. All four of us left the cult.
I think people with more education or higher intelligence are just more likely to leave a cult.
