Study Shows Religious Children Are Less Generous Than Their Secular Counterparts

What is that stereotype again? The stereotype is that atheists are immoral, devilish nihilists who have rejected God because they want carte blanche to sin all they want without any supervisory authority.

Of course, this often ignores the inconvenient truth that religious people ‘sin’ just as much as non religious people. In fact, they probably do it more- after all they have an infinite number of clean slates available to them from daddy Jesus, anytime they feel like accessing that slate.

So that view of atheists is one that is demonstrably wrong, although it still stops no one from holding those views. And whilst findings of studies are often fleeting, in this instance it is telling us, at the very least- that secular values can trump religious ones in certain instances. Chew on that, fundamentalists!

The new study, a comprehensive one for its type, it must be mentioned- has found that non religious kids are more generous that religious kids. The study covered about 1170 children from six countries- US, Canada, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa, and China. The ideological breakdown is 510 Muslim, 280 Christian, and 323 nonreligious children.

Science Mag reports…

“The test revolved around that ubiquitous childhood currency, stickers. Children ages 5 to 12 met individually with adults who let them choose 10 of their favorite stickers. The children were then told that the adults didn’t have time to distribute the rest of their stickers to other kids in a fictive class. But each child was told they could put some of their 10 stickers in an envelope to be shared with other kids, who were described as being from the same school and ethnic group. The scientists used the number of stickers left in the envelope as a measure of altruism.

The children from nonreligious households left 4.1 stickers on average, a statistically significant difference from Christian children (3.3) and Muslim ones (3.2). Also, the more religious the household, based on a survey of parents, the less altruistic the child. The child’s age, socioeconomic status, and country of origin also played a role, but not enough to override the effect of religious differences, according to the study. In older children, the split was most stark, with religious youth increasingly unlikely to share.

Kids in the study also watched short videos in which one child did something bad to another, such as shoving. The children then ranked how mean they thought the incident was, and how severely they wanted the instigator punished. Nonreligious children tended to rank the incidents as less mean. Muslim children on average gave the highest rankings and sought harsher punishments than either their Christian or secular counterparts”

 

The lead researcher on the study, Jean Decety, thinks that his findings might have something to do with moral licensing. That’s when a person feels permitted—even unconsciously—to do something wrong, because they see themselves as a morally correct person.

Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, said that their findings “support the notion that the secularisation of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact it does just the opposite,”

A psychologist speculated that the findings might be because secular kids are trained the do the right thing because ‘it is the right thing to do’ whilst religious kids have to do the right thing because, God. Couple that with moral licensing and the results ain’t that pretty.

If you think a lot of the things I state are blindingly obvious, trust me, they aren’t to people in my country. So I always run the risk of sounding senile in my pieces, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take to get these accepted values across that Ghanaians somehow think are anathema.

So no, atheists aren’t terrible people, and irrespective of what scripture says, we aren’t fools either. And here science, (you know, that thing that brought you that smart phone you like so damn much) says we can even raise better kids. It is just one study, but it confirms what a lot of people had already begun to suspect.

Secular morality is the future of this species.