Paris: Really ? "Atheist Nations are more intelligent, educated and happy" ? Really ?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201102/does-religion-make-people-happier
Does religion make people happier?
Are atheists actually happier?
Published on February 17, 2011 by Nigel Barber, Ph.D. in The Human Beast
If religion contributes to happiness, then the most religious countries should be happiest. Yet, the opposite is true.
According to Gallup data for 2010, the happiest nations were Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. These are among the least religious countries in the world. Also according to Gallup data, Sweden, Denmark and Norway were the second, third, and fourth least religious states, being exceeded only by Estonia in their atheism.
...The principle source of European happiness is also the main reason for their unprecedented level of atheism. As detailed in an earlier post, when countries become more affluent, and their people acquire greater material security, their religious temperature nose dives (4).
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It only makes sense that agnostics and atheists would know more about relgion than the religious. I have noted on several occasions that believing is one step up in the evolutionary chain for sentient creatures. It's just above feeling. Many religious people simply stop right there and never take the time to think, research from a 360 degree perspesctrive, analyze and prove. It appears, based on the data, that the same lazy mindedness associated with their religion carries over to most everything else.
Atheists tend to require as much very good evidence as possible before making decisions. And several studies point out that atheists are simpy more intelligent than religious people. I posted a refernce to one such study last week. Here it is again:
In a 2013 meta-analysis, led by Professor Miron Zuckerman, of 63 scientific studies about IQ and religiosity, a negative relation between intelligence and religiosity was found in 53 out of 63.
In 2008, intelligence researcher
Helmuth Nyborg examined whether IQ relates to denomination and income , using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth , which includes intelligence tests on a representative selection of white American youth, where they have also replied to questions about religious belief. His results, published in the scientific journal Intelligence , demonstrated that atheists scored an average of 1.95 IQ points higher than agnostics, 3.82 points higher than liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than other dogmatic persuasions.
Secondly, the authors investigated the link between religiosity and intelligence on a country level. Among the sample of 137 countries, only 23 (17%) had more than 20% of atheists, which constituted "virtually all... higher IQ countries." The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which was determined to be "highly statistically significant".
Another provocative finding indicated both atheists and agnostics are surprisingly knowledgable about a variety of religions.
blog.dictionary.com atheism/agnosticism..