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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (25339)	10/7/1998 10:47:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I will reread "What Men Live For." I thought of Chekov, but was doing novels instead of short stories, so... --------------------------------------------------------------- Some statistics that have no particular interest to me except that they seem to have a certain pertinence to the notion that theist ethics must be superior in their efficacy as compared to non theist ones. They also seem to be sorta the obverse of the statistic I cited earlier regarding atheists in prison (that they are statistically underrepresented there.) 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."