This question has been on my mind for a while ? Do you think that non religious people (atheists,agnostics,etc) are smarter than their religious counterparts ? Does having a belief hinder your intelligence to its maximum capability or does it really depend on the person themselves? For me I think it's true in most cases ... but what do you guys think is it true ?
It depends upon what you consider to be evidence of "smart" and "dumb."
I've seen some dumb people say the correct thing without a clue in the world as to why it is correct, and I've seen smart people make exceptionally articulate and compelling arguments for things that are just simply incorrect (including myself - assuming I am allowed to advance the idea that I am capable of being intelligent).
I've seen people who can recite Special Relativity to you, but who can't wrap their heads around troubleshooting an electric clothes dryer.
Usually, the question isn't "how intelligent are you?" - the question is "in what way is your intelligence allocated" and "how effective are you at employing it?"
For some people - there are a lot of "unspent points" that they could afford to put into the 'intelligence' category. For others, they've put a lot into 'intelligence' while neglecting 'wisdom.' I find this describes most modern intellectuals. They'd be amazingly intelligent if they could actually bother to realize that there's no need to build the world they envision because one already exists around them.
Ultimately, you could say that I believe much of what people consider "smart," today, is useless because little of what they talk about is of any practicality. The efforts of intellectuals to destroy spiritual beliefs have left many souls void and many homes broken. Their campaigns against traditions and moral boundaries have yielded fruitless lives and slaves to flesh. They are too arrogant to realize that the means are creating an ends their intelligence couldn't predict, nor can their logic justify. "The ends justify the means" is a very dangerous line of logic to employ, and when made the modus operandi, is the essence of evil.