For a true religious person, being empathetic is more important than the need to demonstrate individual smart.
For the secular humanist, both empathy and analytical thinking are fundamental virtues, and both are part of the rational ethics of secular humanism. It's not an either-or-matter.
Furthermore, the inability to think analytically doesn't make one's thinking empathetic. It just means that one is going through life without being able to think critically, which is analogous to the horse with no rider, the horse being the emotions, desires, and impulses, the rider being the element that guides the emotions in an effort to maximize the good ones and minimize the undesired outcomes. If you can do that well, with a little luck, you'll navigate through life relatively smoothly. If you can't think well, you make many more mistakes and errors of judgment, perhaps marrying into an abusive relationship, or drunk driving and paralyzing or killing yourself, or accidental drug overdosing, or dropping out of high school. These are the kinds of mistakes people who act on urge unrestrained by the reins of reason make much more often, leading to lives of regret and insecurity.
Finally, my first 55 years of life were spent in America, the next 10 in Mexico. The two are very different when it comes to religion. It's the American experience that informs my opinions of religion, which I confess is a limited perspective. But in America, it's not the Christians with the empathy. It's the secular humanists. Which kind of man has empathy for the lives of women - their rights, their social equality, their equal pay? It was the Christians that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment a few decades back.
Who is demonizing and marginalizing the lives of homosexuals, calling them immoral and appropriately hell-bound, and who is taking the empathetic position that since I wouldn't want to be mistreated like that, I won't do it to others?
Who is taking the side of the transgendered person who wants to be able to choose a bathroom that he or she feels comfortable in, and who is telling them to take a hike and refusing to use the pronouns of the preferred gender?
Consider the white supremacists marching at Charlottesville, and the antifa counter-protesting them. Which is the empathetic group, and which are selfish, hateful, bigots? Which group do you think has the greater concentration of Christians? Which has the greater concentration of secular humanists?
We're not told (or I skimmed over) what criteria were used to assess for empathy other than a certain region on a functional magnetic resonance brain scan (fMRI) becoming more active.
Atheists OTOH are smarter but are more likely psychopaths.
Also, the definition of psychopathy is suspect. The article read, "
atheists were found to be most aligned with psychopaths — people classified as such due to their lack of empathy."
That's incorrect. That is the definition of sociopathy. Psychopathy adds malice and a proclivity for violence, especially sadistic violence to bare sociopathy, or indifference to the harm that comes to others. The sociopath might hurt you say by embezzling funds from you because he doesn't care what harm comes to you, but his purpose is to get your money, not to hurt you. The psychopath will harm you because that is his purpose. That is his pleasure.
Apparently, this was also assessed by fMRI, as if there is a region of the brain the imaging of which identifies psychopaths, but since they misdefined the word and are using a neurological proxy for psychopathy rather than a look at the person's life as a psychiatrist would do, I am skeptical of that claim as well.
