I guess it depends on what religion we are discussing, if we are taking democrats and their worship of big government then no. But Judeo-Christian religion has been good for society in general.

It depends on the religion. Islam and Marxism are two religions we can live without.

Did you factor in Islamic countries that allow cousin marriages/inbreeding which results in lower IQs?

Most religions will cripple a nation. State religion in particular as well as statism.

There are possibilities for religion to help a nation, but that is a complex topic.

Personally I think religion is hogwash, but every so often the #Left gets on my nerves and I consider promoting a religion that worships #AdolfHitler as a god.

When asked whether “...religion is an important part of your daily life?”

I would bet that most of those people with “High IQs” Simply FAIL the question.
Were I asked the question, I too would FAIL the question because I would equate ... think of ... the answer in terms of Prayer, Church, Expression of Faith ...

The TRUTH is, the Religious Training People receive as Children is Most Likely a VERY Important Part of Their Lives EVERY DAY.

Think on This ...
WHERE Did YOU Learn YOUR Code of Ethics?
WHERE Did YOU Learn YOUR “Sense of Morality”?
WHERE Did YOU Learn YOUR Concept of Right and Wrong?

MOST of Us HONESTLY would have to admit it came through either Direct Religious Training OR through Your Parents’ Direct Religious Training.

Part of TODAY’S Problems stems from comes from the LOSS of this Training where Children are now “Learning” These Things through rather poor substitutes like “Sesamee Street”

How IMPORTANT is “Religion” in MY Daily Life?
Not so much.
How IMPORTANT is My “Religious Training” in MY Daily Life?
I don’t think I can imagine Living Without It.

Religion is a tool that can be used for good or bad. It can enlighten and guide, or it can enslave and dictate, depending on how it's implemented.

Who comes up with this IQ shit? This is the 2nd such article. I see this as no different than CRT. Knock it off.

re the poll... Depends on the religion.

Well, I supposed that depends on what is meant by religion; Oxford's first definition concerns "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods," but that isn't attributable to religions like Shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism, or even Scientology.(1) The next best definition that applies to all the world's religions is, "a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance."

And if that's the common definition, you could could call "wokeness" a religion. You could call feminism a religion. You could call the people who dress up like Star Wars Jedi and follow the Jedi Code a religion.(2) You could call ANY structured belief system a religion.

So the question really is: is a country better for having structured belief systems?

While my gut reaction is, "well, that greatly depends on what the system would have you believe, doesn't it?" the reality is that structured belief systems DO serve a valuable purpose in establishing cultural norms. Again, you don't need to believe in the supernatural to have religion, you simply have to agree to the same structured beliefs as others. And through that shared belief you establish what constitutes acceptable behavior and actions; that shared belief ultimately becomes culture. Shared culture creates community and belonging. Taken in isolation, these are all generally beneficial things.

Where the problems arise is when believers do not tolerate dissent from non-believers. That's led to things like the Spanish Inquisition and cancel culture. But I would submit that both are expressions of those who lead the religion having the need to control and have dominion over others, versus a mere intolerance for opposing beliefs. That is, religions can co-exist peacefully when they are not interested in fighting each other over wealth, power, and influence.

As to the question, why there is a correlation between lower IQ and higher acceptance of religion, again I can only submit that the need for some religion to control dissent creates a culture of unquestioned obedience, encouraging one to not think or question, which are two of the building blocks of IQ. But that's not the fault of the relgion itself, only of those who are abusing the religion for self-serving purposes.

(1) Yes, I'm aware that Scientology has Xenu, but in their religion, Xenu was an alien dictator that forced people to earth and nuked them around volcanoes.
(2) I think Jedi is actually a registered religion in Australia...

They also have the distinction of being the most 'well hung'. The feminists are right, there is a correlation between penis and brain sizes.

It depends on the religion. Something like Christianity or Judaism is at least helpful, but things like scientology or islam usually leads to problems. You have to look at what the religion teaches.

Well the stronger the religion the more successful a region has historically become.

I believe in the right religion would be best for humanity, maybe not just a people.

Without Judaism, Hebrews wouldn’t been ever noticed. Without Christianity, Tribes wouldn’t had become States. Without Islam, Arabia would had been nomadic raiders. Without Buddhism, Confusionism, Hinduism, the East would had been warring struggling agriculture’s. Even Native Americans had Great Spirit religion. Aztecs and Mayan. Egyptian. What great society has no religion to motivate it? Marxist colonies? Check.

Does the chart mean organized religion or faith?

I don't believe that the Atheist French revolutionists, with their Goddess of Reason and their ten hour days and ten months years were not religious. The just defined themselves as non-religious.
I don't believe that the Bolsheviks were non-religious either. Or the Postmodernists.

Does this include the non-spiritual ideologies that people follow like religions? Some of the biggest ideological zealots I've ever met were staunch atheists.

Confounding of effects. There is a third effect at play which causes both. I would surmise it's the prevalence of modern western culture and education, which at its core is anti-religious due to the cultural shocks of world wars 1 and 2 on europeans, especially.

I'm curious how many people here have taken an I.Q. test and how religious they are.

I'd love to see a slug version of this graph. Lol.

Eastern European Jews were very religious, but on average had higher IQs than their fellow Poles, Russians, Germans, etc.

Depends.

Maybe the religion is so intolerant that other countries are forced to confront it, and end it.

Perhaps the religion is so passive that the country is unable to defend itself.

Perhaps the country has a multiplicity of religions that are antagonistic to each other.

It is also possible that the religion in a country is, by any measurable standard, "good for the country."

But, barring all other considerations, it eventually comes down to the food...

I said yes because the question is misleading.  It assumes there is an alternative to religion.  A case where there is religion and one where there is not.  Technically you can establish religion and non religion but that is a bit of an oversimplification.  The conditions that make religion almost universal didn't just go away because we got smarter.  

Before someone goes and points out I'm the guy that pushes the idea that human intelligence is "artificial" I will deal with that.  It is true that the ability to adapt to the environment is largely cultural.  That culture came first allowing the evolution of large brains.  We have an immense number of memes as thinking tools we can draw on.  None of them were invented by a single brain.  That is swarm intelligence and memetic inheritance.  I never said however that physical and memetic evolution were not reciprocal.  It took big brains to invent religion.  

The question becomes what is the nature of invention.  Is it really top down or is it better to think of it as the intentional stance?  We have reasons but where did those reasons come from?  Did we adopt our reasons by assignment or some other process?  Does it really matter if religion was invented or was it just a product  condensing out of a shared consciousness?  Did the need for religion arise out of preexisting conditions or was it something to create our conditions?  The whole argument about whether religion is real is very misleading.  Unless you think it is a parasitic meme it would be reasonable to assume it served some useful function.  

Disproving that religion is a parasitic meme would be hard if not impossible.  You can make similar arguments about almost any aspect of culture.  If we all die in a nuclear holocaust would you say that physics is a parasitic meme that killed the host?  By the way who invented physics?  Did they do so to manipulate the masses?   The answer is we do not know who, or more exactly multiply whos, invented physics nor religion.   I'm just going to assume that neither was a conspiracy.  The process of the evolution of both served a fitness purpose that was more or less symbiotic.

The blind clockmaker is completely amoral.  It largely doesn't matter if you are talking about physical or cultural evolution.  Religion to the extent it is an evolved meme is just as amoral as science.  The question becomes has the environment shifted enough that whatever fitness "purpose" religion served doesn't have to be fulfilled or is fulfilled by some other meme.   It's not an easy question.  The only thing we can say with some degree of certainty is that there has been very little physical evolution in the meantime.  

We have two kinds of fitness problems one for genes and one for memes.  They are not completely independent.  Islam for example is perfectly designed to take a nomadic culture and turn it into a highly successful device for spreading both genes and memes.  The reproductive mores of Islam insures both lots of boys to turn into warriors and that the religious meme will be protected.  When it became "civilized or settled" it lost a lot of its "purpose" and fitness value.  It ran into all the problems other settled people and their memes face.  So religion can serve as an aid to fitness in an ethnocentric context.  We have now decided that ethnocentrism is "bad".  We have a new meme called multiculturalism and as it becomes dominant the competing meme of religion is being replaced because what once enhanced fitness now diminishes it.  Or not time will tell it certainly looks like Islam could win in some European countries.  Again you have to remember that religion to the extent it evolved is amoral.  

I mentioned multiculturalism specifically but it is just part of an emerging complex of memes.   The environment that drives that evolution is naturalism and science.  Science and naturalism have been slowly killing God for over there centuries.  The interesting thing is that killing God didn't really get rid of Religion except in the technical sense.  Whenever the cult of social justice runs into science it doesn't like it tries to overwhelm it.  It tries to reproduce faster than science can.  Again thinking of it as a conspiracy is misleading.  The next question is if it is a parasitic meme or not?  Is it killing the host?  Does it have its own fitness advantage and for whom?  To answer that question we would need to delve into the mouse utopia experiments.  Are the people that propagate the social justice meme spiteful mutants?  Would we have been more fit with the religious meme?  I know it's tiresome but remember evolved memes are amoral.  They are blind.  

Anyone with any experience with animal husbandry must be aware we are not breeding our best and brightest.  We are not even breeding those people that are best adapted to civilized life.  The religious people are doing that.  There is an unfortunate trade off between intelligence and not only reproductive rate but the type of morality that keeps a civilization functional.  Morality is just as much a figment of our imagination as religion.  That does not mean it is not real.  It's as real as money.  It's an abstract socially constructed tool.  The magic of it is you don't have to be intelligent to use it.   All you need is another abstract tool, freewill.  In terms of fitness intelligence is coming in second to morality.  The "intelligent" are getting perilously close to fighting back with means to reduce the fitness of the less intelligent.  If you don't think IQ is a real thing then you have not noticed its effect in the world.  The first group that has to go is the deplorables and their fitness is being reduced by economic means.  They have to go first because they are the group for whom morality is most advantageous.

The final question concerns group or swarm intelligence, the build up over time of mutational load in the population and related problems.  Are the elites the most fit and do they have greater swarm intelligence?  The answer I believe is becoming increasingly clear as they time and time again fail to meet their stated objectives even within their own group.  The one thing they have a severe disadvantage in is the level of ethnocentric cooperation that religion provides.  They will be swallowed up by the Chinese who keep their strange ethnocentric religion.  The elites in China have no interest in the well being of elites elsewhere.  Hubris is a very dangerous thing.

I'm happy to be a broken record here. IQ is valid it just isn't what you think it is. What it measures is as obscure and yet as obvious as consciousness. Almost any set of problem solving questions could be used to measure IQ. The fact that we do not know what it is measuring is no more relevant than the fact that we do not know what consciousness is.

Can we predict what group of people are most likely to be criminals? Yes we can, males with low IQs and high testosterone. If we were talking about any other animal besides humans people would just say well of course that is true.

So that is IQ as a metric for group behavior. What about at the individual level? IQ is used to measure individual ability as a counseling guide, criminal competency, guardianship, in conjunction with other mental health tests, etc. as with any other tool you can't blame the tool for the way it is used.

I suppose we have to deal with the problem of psychology not being a science. I would like to be snarky and say it's about as useful as the thousands of theoretical physicists we pay for. Maybe we should look at the thousands of academic economists and their forecast record? In science it's all about accuracy and precision. If you think by hard science you mean absolute you are missing the point.

For almost anything I can think of it's better to try and create a measurement than to say something like it's too broad and subjective to even attempt to measure. It's all about knowing how accurate and precise a measurement is as to properly apply it. It's like field archery you never know how far the target is but a good guess is better than a random attempt. You have to consider the collateral damage that is why you make sure no one is standing within the range of error.

Religion has the potential to be good... depends on the religion, and it depends on how its influence is propagated.
Religion is a cultural activity, that should therefore take place entirely in the Private sector.

Religion can be a great stabilizing and unifying cultural influence, it seems to me, as long as participation is voluntary. Recruitment into the religion, and the encouragement of accepted norms within, should be done by example; not by force. You think your way is "Good" and "Right"? Well... prove it... show me. What kind of person has it made you?
People, or sects, who are just plain doing it wrong... won't inspire much emulation. Sects who are doing it right, will. And the accepted norms should remain constrained over time to those which are more "Right" and beneficial, as a consequence.

On the other hand, any measure of Theocracy is bad... and just plain wrong, by the definition of Wrong (i.e., "not Right"... as in: you don't have the Right.)
Theocracy is nothing more than good old-fashioned tyranny, despite the sheep's clothing.
There is no opportunity for misguided interpretations to die out... because they are not allowed to.
They are preserved by Force, by self-righteous zealots who sincerely believe their Ends are "just" and "good"... and that any Means that they deem to be "necessary" to reach that goal are, therefore, justified.
And don't kid yourself with the assumption that this only applies to the dozen-or-so "accepted" major religions with which you are familiar. Any -ism or -ology from which you derive some or all of your moral code... is your "religion".
Most people (even among the "major" religions) are not very "religious". But... there is nobody among us who has no "religion". If you have a set of morals... and you do, then you have a "religion".

The Nazis even thought that what they were doing was "good"... for the Aryan race and, by extension, for all of humanity in the long-run; whom they would dominate and rule to everybody's ultimate benefit. They believed that what they did was "necessary", and therefore justified by the noble Ends they were pursuing.
The Holocaust was, effectively, no different than the Medieval Catholic's Inquisition.
And, if you're a Progressive you'll have to forgive me... but that self-righteous Nazi-delusion also describes your religion perfectly.
If you think that taking what is essentially the same path, will somehow bring you to a different place... I'm afraid you are mistaken.