As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now,I love hyperbole and other literary devices. It amazed me that people took my flights of fancy seriously.
We aren't telepaths, Alan. Nobody knows who you are behind the screen, in real life. (I don't think that anybody cares very much either.) All we see are the words that you put up on the screen. If they are what you call 'hyperbole and other literary devices' (otherwise known as 'bullshit') then that's what you're going to be here, until and unless you can produce something better.
When someone attempts to get a rise out of me by using an insulting adjective, I normally try to jack them up until they learn that that approach doesn’t work.
You've been trying to provoke people, to 'jack them up' as you put it, from your very first post. You've bragged about doing it. So please don't even try to play the victim now. You're a troll, nothing more, until you can transform yourself into something more interesting by making some thoughtful or informative posts. Nobody can do that for you, you have to do it yourself. And I sense that your time is running out with the moderators.
Here are the four issues I have raised (with evidence):
1) Religious people are less intelligent than non-religious people
I don't believe that one. It certainly doesn't correspond to my own experience. I've encountered more than my share of seemingly-stupid atheists, while many of the most thoughtful, humane and best-educated people that I've ever known have had some sort of deeply-held religiosity.
Your claim doesn't even make a whole lot of sense, without clarification as to how 'intelligence' is being defined, whether we are talking about individuals or statistical averages for broad populations, how 'religious' and 'non-religious' people are being distinguished, and so on.
It's my observation that both the religious and non-religious classes present us with complete ranges on just about every variable. There's tremendous overlap. Some individuals within each group perform very badly, while others do very well. So right out of the gate, it's simply foolish to suggest that all members of one class are going to out-perform all members of another class. It's equally foolish to suggest that an individual non-religious person will be smarter than another religious individual, based on nothing more than their respective religiosities.
And keep in mind that as a group, people who claim no religious adherence perform very near the national average in terms of percentage with university degrees. A number of religious groups have a significantly higher statistical likelihood of having graduated. (And a number are lower as well.)
2) Where religion and science conflict, science always wins
That assumes that religion and science are directly competing by producing explanations for earthly physical phenomena.
It's true that religions often include ancient cosmogonic myths, but it isn't clear that those myths were ever intended to be science-style explanations or that they must be taken literally by people today as if they were accounts of actual historical events. Mythical cosmogonies usually have different sorts of philosophical points to make, expressed in ancient story-form. But myths shouldn't just be dismissed, since they are how ancient philosophical ideas were expressed in the millenia before the appearance of philosophy-proper.
I'll even go farther and say that in the area of spiritual psychology, a number of religious traditions probably can give modern Western psychology a real run for its money. The Buddhists and Hindu yoga have several thousand years experience with meditation and introspective mindfulness that academic psychologists are only beginning to appreciate. Some forms of Christianity and Islam have fascinating contemplative traditions as well.
And there's the whole artistic, ethical, emotional and, some would say, salvific side of religion. Those are what most religious people would identify as the central and most important aspects of their traditions and they are concerns that science doesn't even really try to address.
3) “sacred” scriptures contain major internal contradictions indicating they cannot come from an infallible deity.
Maybe the deity isn't infallible. Or maybe the deity tells particular people what they need to know at a particular time, in a particular circumstance. Maybe different people need to hear different things.
As for me, I think that the world's scriptures were written by human beings. To the extent that they were inspired at all, they were inspired in much the same way that a beautiful sunset might inspire a poem. I don't just dismiss religious scriptures with your simple-minded contempt though, since I believe that they embody the early community's shared spiritual concerns and experiences, along with a tradition's ever-changing understanding of what those things mean in life. That's why I believe that scriptures are best read in terms of the history of ideas.
4) The horrific moral code contained in the OT indicates that this didn't come from a deity.
Probably not. What's interesting to me about Old Testament ethics is how that original savage tribal faith was progressively modified and tamed as Hebrew cultural sensibilities became more sophisticated, by the Prophets, by Jesus, and then by the whole subsequent Judeo-Christian tradition. We can watch similar historical changes taking place in many other religions as well. What we are left with in every case isn't a single monolithic faith, but a wide variety of approaches, understandings and sub-traditions, at many different levels of sophistication.
