Room Temperature IQ

He who knows other men is discerning;
he who knows himself is intelligent.
—Lao-Tzu

Our stint in the Church of God has lowered our IQ and we need look no further than the research by Roy Baumeister at the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio who led the study on rejection:

Rejection can dramatically reduce a person’s IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.

“It’s been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive,” says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. “But we’ve found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive.”

Baumeister’s team used two separate procedures to investigate the effects of rejection. In the first, a group of strangers met, got to know each other, and then separated. Each individual was asked to list which two other people they would like to work with on a task. They were then told they had been chosen by none or all of the others.

In the second, people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family.

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

“These are very big effects – the biggest I’ve got in 25 years of research,” says Baumeister. “This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you’re excluded, this has significant effects.”

Baumeister thinks rejection interferes with a person’s self-control. “To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example – and instead, you behave impulsively.”

Baumeister presented his results at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Blackpool, Lancashire, UK.

Those of us exposed to the ministerial machinations of the Churches of God have been abused. The range of abuse has ranged from the seemingly mild innocuous to the full blown. We’ve all been given false feedback. It is distorted perception involved with the evaluation of our worth in *the scheme of things*. Even reading the flagship magazine is often an assault on our worth.

Mama mosquito injects an anesthetic first thing before drawing blood. It’s to turn off our defenses, otherwise we might end her parasitic predatory poking perfunctorily. By the same token, the Churches of God have injected us with sometimes less than half-truths to get us to turn off our defenses against the onslaught of nonsense, persuading us that we are worthless and our only salvation is to follow the leadership which only has worth. This conditioning has resulted in the breakdown of the inner mechanisms which not only regulate our behavior, but protects us from the dangers of becoming prey for predatory parasites who offer no real benefit to us as miserable hosts having our blood sucked from us. We’ve been inoculated against sanity. The result ranges from mild irritation to full blown disease and death.

There are really big effects. It isn’t just the rejection, there is a whole range of destructive behaviors associated with association of the Pastards of the abusive churches of God, including, but not restricted to, hypocrisy [which is the leavening of the Pharisees], lust for lovely things which you pay for with your tithes, lies, broken promises and covenants, open thievery and copyright violations, arrogance, trivialization, stalking and fondling–in some cases rape–being disfellowshipped for telling the truth, being ignored when you bring importantly vital information forward, and out and out breaking of civil laws. In terms of morality, it’s a total write-off as pure loss. Things have gotten strange and crazy. The whole thing from beginning to end is just plain nuts.

The result is what we have seen. People become apathetic. People become aggressive. People do stupid and foolish things.  People do things which make no sense. People try their best to make things work when it is obvious that there is no way to make them work short of violating the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and man. Cognitive dissonance sets in. People try to make things work by assuming that the end justifies the means, but it never does. People are led to do things they know aren’t right in order to support a just cause. People adapt to the insanity. The results are now predictable. There is an increase in aggression, a 25% drop in IQ and a 30% drop in analytical reasoning scores.

Let’s think about that for a second. A 30% drop in analytical reasoning scores: That means that you lose the ability to analyze the *evil* you find yourself in. Thus, you tolerate stalkers, fondlers, rapists, pedophiles, psychopaths in your midst because you have lost your ability to reason that the proper reaction is to whip out your cell phone and dial 9-1-1. A family member of the teenager girl who was groped by the 70 year old elder in the UCG, IA wrote to me and wondered in the e-mail if he should get the police involved? A sense of justice, judgment and equity was just plain *gone*. People thus exposed to abusive authority have lost their ability to tell right from wrong and they have lost their sense of ethics, mostly due to the rejection of the church administration. [UCG, IA must stand for Unethical Crime Generators, Imposing Aberrations!]

It is an unpleasant maddening itch which can’t be satisfied by standard scratching. The scratch which needs to be done is to scratch the church from your association. Let’s face it: For the most part, you are associating with people with whom you would have no association in the first place unless you were forced to work with them on the job or they were your vendor or you were their customer. You probably would have no use for them if you met them on the street. They don’t really think like you, they don’t have the same interests you do, they don’t have the same background, they don’t share your inherited talents and abilities, they don’t have your values. You usually don’t have anything really in common with the people with whom you associate in the church short of the abuse and sharing common doctrines. Even in the case of doctrines it turns out that most the people didn’t even share that with you, and it became obvious when they either stayed or didn’t, and went off with the spit-offs. You were forced to associate with people you really don’t like that much but were forced to ‘love’ them. One woman told me [at lunch after court] that she had just found out that members of a congregation actually hate her. She never realized that until events occurred where the attitude of her ‘friends’ was revealed. You might not understand that others left in your congregation aren’t as willing to help and support you as you might think. Many of them have already betrayed you, but maybe you haven’t caught on yet because your IQ has dropped so precipitously.

And so we have all pretty much ended up with room temperature IQs, lowered every time a minister or leader of the church enters the room.

Perhaps it is time to end the parasitic predatory poking perfunctorily by giving it a good whack where it will stop the damage to us instead of losing yet more blood by being devalued by avaricious incompetent pastards to become a mere commodity in the rapidly diminishing sheople stealing market.

You can raise your IQ immediately by rejecting the rejecters: Leave. With any luck, it will lower their IQ by 25%, make them lose 30% of their analytical abilities and make them more aggressive. Too bad: Stay out of reach by leaving the blood-sucker infested swamp for good.

Here’s to your more intelligent better health and wellbeing!

Blast from the past…