RE: Article: Would the world be better off without religion?
July 31, 2014 at 6:39 pm
(This post was last modified: July 31, 2014 at 6:51 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(July 31, 2014 at 4:59 pm)rasetsu Wrote: In a study of high-school students, Furrow and colleagues (2004) similarly found a strong association between religiosity and prosocial interests, including empathy and a sense of responsibility toward others. Most, although not all, investigators (e.g., Kohlberg 1981) have also reported positive correlations between individuals’ religiosity and their level of moral reasoning (Ellis and Peterson 1996), meaning that more religious individuals tend to reason in slightly more sophisticated ways about moral problems compared with nonreligious individuals (although moral reasoning and moral behavior tend to be only moderately correlated; e.g., Stams et al. 2006).
It does indeed take a form of moral sophistication to moralize one's way through blowing up little girls on buses in order to get to 72 promised virgins in heaven. Most atheist moral simpletons would have given up at "that's just wrong", and "there ain't no heaven".
