Excerpted from Do You Believe in God? by Michael Shermer, from Sceptic,vol 6 no 2 [paragraphing mine.E]
"...In 1934 Abraham Franzblau found a negative correlation between
acceptance of religious beliefs and three different measures of
honesty. That is, as religiosity increased, honesty decreased.
In 1950 Murray Ross conducted a survey among 2,000 associates of the
YMCA and discovered that agnostics and atheists were more likely to
express their willingness to aid the poor than those who rated
themselves as deeply religious.
Hirschi and Stark (1969) reported no difference in the self-reported
likelihood to commit crimes between children who attend church
regularly and those who do not.
These are not isolated databases. Ronald Smith, Gregory Wheeler, and
Edward Diener (1975), for example, discovered that college-aged
students in religious schools were no less likely to cheat on a test than
their atheist and agnostic counterparts in nonreligious schools.
Surprisingly (given the opposite public perception), Russell Middleton
and Snell Putney (1962) reported an increase in cheating among religious
students versus nonreligious students.
Finally,... David Wulff's comprehensive survey of correlational studies in
his textbook, Psychology of Religion (1991), reviews dozens more
studies of this nature, [ital.mine.E] as well as those that reveal that
there is a consistent positive correlation between "religious affiliation,
church attendance, doctrinal orthodoxy, rated importance of religion,
and so on" with "ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, social
distance, rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and specific forms of
prejudice, especially against Jews and blacks" (219-220).
The conclusion is clear: not only does religion not necessarily make one
more moral, it is at least statistically associated with intolerance,
racism, sexism, and disregard of most of the other values desired in a
free and democratic society."
[And of course we know that atheists are underrepresented in prison. Of course the more educated you are the more likely you are to be an atheist, and the more likely you are to earn a decent living and stay of of prison....][Have there been any studies of the correlation of education and moral codes? I wonder.] |
