kisai

I never really believed. But my parents were Catholic. I was a voracious reader and my parents bought me a copy of The Children's Bible. Now, I do read mythology, so no I didn't turn my nose up at the creation story or Noah's Ark or the Tower of Babel. But while I was getting through Exodus and more to the part where the Israelites settle into Canaan, I noticed that they couldn't get along with anybody. It just started to sicken me how much killing was in this book. Then I get to the 10 Commandments. And one of them is "Thou shalt not kill." "Finally", I thought, "there will be a change!" Very next chapter was God assisting Moses in killing the Midianites by having the battle be successful if Moses can keep his hands up. I stopped reading.

People know that the purpose of a coffee filter is to let water through, and sieve the grounds, yes? Sounds pretty useless as a liquid barrier.

Don't confuse ability and talent with rationality. Rationality is, well, several qualities, but one of these qualities is realizing causal links between events and asking for evidence that these events (or a version thereof) occurred. To be a great neurosurgeon, you do not need to be rational. The brain is (more or less) a closed system. You can know everything about its structure, as well as how to perform surgery upon it, without caring about how it evolved, or its similarity to other species' brains. I daresay we'll have electronic neurosurgeons in the future, and they'll be superior to human neurosurgeons, and they won't be particularly caring about the evolution of the brain either.

If my memory serves, it is an incredibly out of date book that is more focused on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, which I find to be more arcane than quantum physics itself.

If information is cited on Wikipedia, I generally don't provide a reference. Herod the Great died in 4 BCE. The census could not have taken place until the Romans took direct rule of Judea in 6 AD.

The census of Quirinius which Luke claims to have been the reason for Jesus' birth in Bethlehem actually took place 10 years earlier. Its placement in the gospels is a fabrication in order to align Jesus' post-mortem deification with prophecies. There is no reason to take an expectant mother on a four day walk on a highway. However, the fabrication does point to the actual existence of Jesus. Had he been wholly fictional, it would have been simpler just to have him born and live in Bethlehem.

5 meters going round.

Let me refer you to your original post. When you use terms such as "religiosity" and "intelligence metric", you are referring not to individuals, but how religious (or intelligent) people are in groups. If I wanted to measure the religiosity of my town, I would ideally ask everyone in the town to fill out a survey, or interview them regarding their religious behaviors. If I didn't have time to survey everyone, then I'd try to randomly sample proportionally from different neighborhoods. Either way, I'd get an average number. That average number would be an indication of the religiosity of my town. The point being, when you use the word religiosity, you're referring to a group of people. If you're comparing a trend in religiosity to intelligence, that's also referring to a group of people. Whenever you're looking at groups of people for trends, you're using statistics. The mistake you're making is that you're taking information from groups of people and trying to apply it to individuals. This is wrong. I can show a definite correlation between lung cancer and smoking heavily. This does not mean your Uncle Frank who smokes two packs a day is going to die of lung cancer. Uncle Frank may not even have a hint of any cancer and live to the ripe age of 102, smoking like a chimney. This doesn't mean the statistics are wrong, or Uncle Frank is wrong.

I have captured some 3D space inside my coffee cup. Sometimes it is inhabited by air and sometimes by coffee. I find it much more interesting when the space contains coffee.

My comment was directed towards the OP, who is using statistical knowledge to analyze individuals.

Because there's things about him that don't fit into his follower's supposed prophecies. For instance, he was actually born in Nazareth, but the prophecies call for Bethlehem. So his followers had to make up a story that there was a census that forced the birth to be in Bethlehem. If Jesus was fictional, it would have been easier just to say he was born in Bethlehem.

You are performing the error of comparing statistics to actual individuals. Statistics are for analyzing the trends of groups only

I experience the same cognitive shift as well with my poor sleep habits.. Let us say I'm watching a movie in bed and I'm nodding off. I will have a thought about the movie, or what the characters are about to do next, and fabricate something that is imaginative but always false. For instance, if it is Lord of the Rings and the characters are in the Mines of Moira, I might shut my eyes and suddenly imagine that they are going downstairs to check rental prices in the goblin warrens. And it is a thought, not a whole tableau of visual fantasy.

You'll probably have to do more math and physics with astrophysics than EE. Electrical Engineering classes nowadays mostly are half or less Computing Engineering degrees. Yes, having both would be cool, but I would switch to astrophysics if your love is astrophysics. There is nothing that prevents you from continuing your education once you finish university. I also think you might change your mind again when you get exposed to more ideas.