No, not really:

“Brenner found that the United States and Canada were outliers—not in religious attendance, but in overreporting religious attendance. Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans.”

what kind of bullshit move is it to substitute “western world” for “world wide”? i’m not a moron, i’m quite aware of america’s religiosity as a developed nation. that’s why i said “world wide.”

Um, doesn’t America have one of the highest church attendances in the Western world? Something like over 40%, compared to 15% in France, 10% in UK, 8% in Australia?

It really isn’t _that_ typical.

P.

There is some way where this is badly confused, or badly written, I cannot tell which.

As if science were an exclusionally defined thing like blues music and there were other methods of getting facts that might have been just as good if they hadn’t been outcompeted by science, red in tooth and claw.

Since atheism correlates to higher intelligence are we to assume intelligence is a mental deviation as well ?
very high and low intelligence is a mental deviation by definition.

That has to get comment of the week. Funniest thing I’ve read all week. I love how people can’t distinguish between deviation in a technical sense and being a deviant in a colloquial sense.

Perhaps a major player is the release from societal norms and social pressures that allow the mind to formulate its own opinions and realizations about life as opposed to what you are told by an older and jaded generation

Another variable that comes to mind is the focus of the imagination in the formative years.. while child A is perceived as ‘normal’.. he is forced to submit to a deluge of stories and pressures that are designed to ‘steer’ or ‘engineer’ his mental state to that which would mimic his forefathers (thereby justifying their lifelong devotion)….
while child B is deemed autistic or the sufferer of a wide range of mental malformities and is thusly allowed to focus on things that are more ‘real’: the wind in the trees, the colors in the box of crayons, the water as it flows from the faucet.. not that I am attempting to imply that austistic means ‘simple’.. more that, if you are less expected to be a part of the play, you may have time to notice that the story is really rather silly and there are many more beautiful things in the real world

I’m talking about “choice” (opinion), not proof. Of course my statement is itself an opinion. If you don’t agree, fine. I’m not going to argue the existence of God here.

“Since atheism correlates to higher intelligence are we to assume intelligence is a mental deviation as well ?”

Two things…

First, as Razib said: “very high and low intelligence is a mental deviation by definition.“.

Second (to address what I think you’re getting at), the concept of a “mental disorder” is not a scientific concept. It is culturally and politically derived. (Note, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t brain diseases. It just means that the concept of “mental disorder” as defined by the DSM, as a whole, does not embody this.) A reference on this is: “What Is Mental Illness?”, by Richard J. McNally. (Or spend some time reading the DSM.)

Given this, something like atheism could be considered a “mental disorder”, in and of itself.

This would not be the first article to speak to atheists being associated with higher functioning brains.Conversely the prevalence of lower brain functioning and religiosity is also widely reported.”

“High Functioning” means absence of mental retardation – attending that 98 % of the general population (vs. 100% of the high functioning autistics) is not mentally retarded, I doubt that this makes much difference in practice.

- Also, atheism is not lack of religion but a conscious choice, or a stone would be atheist

I never believed in the first place and I am amused that you would presume to speak for me. Also try to drop the stone business in future, as it could be construed as the argument of an ideaolog.

It is an observable fact of nature that there is only physical stuff.

You would probably be better off staying with the agnostic position that the existence of God(s) can neither be proven or dismissed.

Finally, if you had trouble with the link you were given, heritable as in “capable of being inherited or of passing by inheritance” says it all.

very high and low intelligence is a mental deviation by definition.

Correlation does not imply causality. Keep in mind that atheism and autism seem to have a correlation, but that does not necessarily mean that one caused the other.

What have we got here?

Both the graphs are from a comparison of users in different online forums.

The control forum is supposed to be matched on age but, as far as I can tell, on nothing else. There are many variables that could account for differences between the two groups.

Similarly, the ASD group is self-selected for that forum and can’t be considered represented of the ASD population.

Pretty weak.