Termyn8or
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Joined: 11/12/2005
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FR
It's been said that religion is the opiate of the people. It was not said by a stupid person so, momentarily at least let's take that angle.
Now I've long held that most of the most important learning in one's life comes in the early years, that is when they learn how to learn in a sense. Now very few people go around giving opiates to kids, but if religious dogma is indeed in a similar bag, what differs ? I don't think many will argue against the assertion that opiates make one think slower, especially in higher quantities, therfore logically would learn more slowly. Opiates or any intoxicant seems to have this effect, and I believe similarities exist in religious dogma. So is it the chcken or the egg ?
Now to get a bit more into the thick. I read studies that indicated that certain components of brain waves were suppressed when one smokes pot for example. Having a memory, I recalled this when they did a similar study on people watching TV, it had a very similar effect. Where does that leave us, can we conclude anything ?
But there is one thing in common, either the influence of a relious dogma or a drug of abuse seems to remove the user's impetus to think and reason, and in fact sometimes adults who imbibe responsibly will cite this as a reason for using the intoxicant, but if the influence is religion they insist that they are more enlightened because of it. Who is lying to themselves then ?
But in all, those who abuse intoxicants are frequently of lower intelligence. Societally based evidence is abound. I think this will be found true of other "sociopaths" except for the rare exception. In fact highly intelligent sociopaths get away with more for longer on average. Unfortunately there are not going to be much statistics available on this as probably some of them are never caught. Remember the ones society labels as sociopaths are the ones who got caught. Does this perhaps indicate that they were not smart enough to get away with it ? I think it quite possible.
But what is intelligence really ? Amsel (Maher) Rothchild was an engineer and a ficancial genius, but in person was he an idiot, somewhat like a savant ? We will never know. What was the IQ of the Rain Man ? (played in a movie by Dustin Hoffman I think). He could do complex math in his head like lightning, and tell you the day of the week on any date back to hundreds of years before he was born. But he thought a loaf of bread cost a hundred bucks and a new car cost a hundred bucks. How the hell do you measure that ?
And that indeed has been a topic about IQ tests for some time now. Some claim that they were racially biased, but were they ? They most certainly were biased in some way, but were they biased the right way. Come on it is a test, and being an IQ test it must of course be biased against the less intelligent. But just how accurate can they shoot that crap roll ? That subject has been discussed ad nauseum.
Perhaps if the idea is to pigeonhole people, we need more pigeonholes. When I took the ACT battery I scored on the 99th percentile in mechanical reasoning, which meant the there were very few people in the country smarter than I IN THAT SUBJECT. I also scored on the 2nd percentile in spelling. That means I was as dumb as a box of rocks IN THAT SUBJECT.
In that context, take the case of a mason. I saw the books, there is quite a bit of learning involved for those so impelled. But I don't need to know how to build a triple lead arch over a doorway anymore than a mason needs to know how an insulated gate field effect transistor works, or it characterisics really. I go to the grocery to go fishing, while others can run a trout line. Who is smarter ? Let's boil it down a bit to who is dependant upon the modern system/economy/whatever to get fish ?
Really if we are to consider one's level of valuable knowledge as a guage of intelligence, who is it that determines what is valuable and what is not ? You tell me.
T
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RE: The intelligence Quotient and it's uses ? - 
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RE: The intelligence Quotient and it's uses ? - 
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