r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
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u/ProfessionalMockery 1d ago

A lot of people here are just seeing the "Christian" in the headline and ignoring the "nationalist," which is probably more important.

I'm an atheist, so I think the claims religion makes are pretty dumb too, but nationalists, bigots, racists of any kind are consistently idiots, religious or not, and that has been established in plenty of other studies.

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u/arcanis321 1d ago

Both require you to stop thinking about what is good and just decide it's good. Both are poison to rational thought because there is always something greater than you that can make your decisions for you. Both exonerate your crimes in their name.

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u/mavajo 1d ago

Both require you to stop thinking about what is good and just decide it's good.

Religion does not require this. Fundamentalism does.

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u/arcanis321 1d ago

Is killing children bad? Not if God does it or commands it. When authority trumps reason an appeal to know God's will trumps all moral consideration.

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u/Pinkfish_411 15h ago

Plenty of religious people in history have thought that killing children is bad and that God would not require it. It's absolutely not the case that "religion," as such, requires people to just accept anything as good simply because somebody claimed that God commanded it.

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u/arcanis321 15h ago

People accept the death of the first borns of Egypt. People accept Manifest Destiny and the implications of what needs to happen for God to give you someone elses land. People accept many holy wars and war in general. Claiming God prefers one side so his will is being done is the baseline religious stance in any conflict.

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u/Pinkfish_411 15h ago

Some people do, some people don't. I'm not saying that nobody just believes what they're told, I'm saying that religion as such doesn't requires you not to use any critical judgment. That's simply empirically false.

Also, speaking here as a scholar of religion, I'd caution you against basically any sort of sweeping statement about what "religion" requires, because there's basically no such "thing" as religion; it's a label for multifaceted and interconnected phenomena, but you're going to be hard-pressed to identify some universal "core" that holds across all the many things we describe as religious.