Typhion

The only way you can assign objective right and wrong is to make the philosophical leap of saying "essence precedes existence." What that means is that truth, morality, and thought are independent of people to generate them.

This basically means that you MUST believe in some form of god or divine order.

If you don't believe in a god or divine order, and still believe there are black and white rights and wrongs, you're just a tad ethnocentric.

I'm thinking smart needs definition here...

Smart to me is the ability to acquire and apply new information quickly. So being relatively young, but having the same knowledge, would mean you are smarter by that definition. To me that's what smart is so....

Dr. Doom

Reed Richards

Lex Luthor

All of these characters have tremendously impressive intellectual feats in short mortal lifespans, and their feats cover and impressive range of interest.

I like how there are 4 instances of 50%. This polling mechanism soon to be instated by the U.S. electoral college....

Oh, and suicide squad is probably the best comic book movie idea I think they could have come up with at this point in the heyday of comic book movies. Should be a really fun and refreshing movie.

Superman, for a number of reasons:

He's one of the first, and many, many others have been made in his likeness to some extent

He's something of an outsider, which most people feel like at some point in their life

Vast majority of the time he does the right thing, even when its very clearly not the easier road to take

He's well developed. His story line is rich and his connections are extensive. He's completely ingrained in the DC universe.

Better

Than

You

Oh my. I think I see why this is hard for you.

You are taking an objective report, and assigning causality to intellectual capacity or lack thereof, and you have no meaningful substantiation. That's what I'm questioning. Pew didn't make the report to highlight a vast intellectual gap between believers and non believers, but that's the ball you're running with. They made a report that showed the differences between groups' answers to a set number of questions. They did not assign any correlation, nor did they place the means on a confidence interval. They did not even begin to plot main and interactive effects, which would be a MUST to even begin to make that report meaningful to the arguments here.

I too use statistics for a living. I'm an actuary, and formerly a quality control engineer. So i specialize in correlation, and design of experiments. That MEANS, that I don't recognize correlation, let alone causation without sufficient evidence. The population proportions would have to have been put on confidence intervals to have real statistical significance (simple hypothesis testing) for anyone who knows anything about statistics to bat an eyelash at it.

Further, correlation coefficients could have been derived if there was a valid point to be made about intellect. None was made.

What you are failing to understand, is the report is nothing more than a poll whose nature isn't entirely known, and whose drivers of observed effects are unknown, and therefore you cannot sensibly use it to make conclusions relevant to the debate here.

To be honest, anyone whose taken a 2nd year stat course could see that. Why do you think you're constantly warned not to take stats to heart?

You're in over your head dude.

Yep. Because if you HAD read the whole article yourself, you would see my point 1 validated. You would also see that 2 and 3 were un-addressed, as I rightly called out.

Only Catholics deviated from the norm on Biblical knowledge, which makes sense, because all protestants are open bible faiths, while Catholics are ritualists. Had the questions skewed toward catholic ritual, you'd see a different distribution.

So yes, you don't get stats.

Yep. Because it's not really free is it? We're paying for it. I work out frequently and manage my diet responsibly. Why should I pay for you if you don't? State sponsored anything opens up that Pandora's box.

They did nothing but elevate the character's status. TBH, Jackman's wolverine is nearly iconic. That's not a bad thing.

@willpayton:

Oh goodness. Stats in the hands of people who don't get stats. Here we go.

Questions that need to be asked:

1) what were the questions? A broad spectrum of religious belief, or targeted at a particular faith. By default, those of a particular faith would logically be inclined to not court other faiths as much and would hence have less exposure to said doctrines. Not a sign of intellect...but a sign of exposure.

2) What were the sample sizes? Are they sufficient to assess statistical significance of the means?

3) Are there main and secondary affects (socioeconomic that lessens exposure?) These would render such a study moot.

Americans love worthless stats...