Catholicism makes us smarter. Each human’s thinking ability is limited by faith. Simple societies who believe in simple deities are wrong about many things. Very primitive societies do not even have words for numbers higher than three or four.
The other side likes ignorance because it keeps people operating at levels useful to them. They want people to believe, for instance, that government is their friend. It’s easier to collect taxes from people who think that.
Those who believe in the state violate the First Commandment, believing that something is more important than God. Their minds can see neither past failures and the inevitability of future failures. Violating the First Commandment destroys the ability to recognize cause and effect, keeping disobedient minds from truth.
Similarly, those driven by lust cannot comprehend how the mind is freed by chastity.
Lust destroys morals. First, the mind is disordered, then destroyed by sin made manifest in the many sexually transmitted diseases.
Despite the worldly belief that IQ is the mental age divided by the chronological age,
(how many really know it’s not the other way around?) intelligence actually equals closeness to God in thought, word, and deed.
The largest and oldest of the Christian denominations is the closest to God and Scripture, and, therefore, produces the smartest people. Oddly, those who are outside that faith are thought to be brighter than the saints most deeply into it. Isaac Newton, for instance, is thought by the worldly to be smarter than St. Thomas Aquinas. Karl Marx is thought to know more about politics than St. Augustine, whose City of God is certainly a better place to live than Marx’s fallen paradises.
