Why be good?

[Esquilax]

How does that survey say anything about atheists? It says that most religious people rely on religion more when staring at death. If anything, the data corroborates my experience. I sat in groups over two years with thousands of Marines. The overwhelming majority of them were very religious. I'm sure that helped them in battle. I didn't say anything about them losing their religion on the battlefield. (Although some few did.) That survey says absolutely nothing about atheists in foxholes.

Yeah, that was my first thought too: Gee, you mean that the majority of soldiers from a series of majority-religious countries, are religious? Who would have thought?

If your sample size is full of religious people, then your results are going to skew toward religion. But since the religious affiliation of those soldiers was neither recorded nor mentioned, we have no way of knowing how many of those soldiers were atheists who turned to religion during wartime, which is kind of a crippling blow to Randy's attempt to use that study to prove that atheists turn religious in danger.

But what's also funny is what happens when you do what Randy did not, and actually go looking for the study he's quoting; now, it's behind a paywall for the most part, the best you can get is a couple pages, but the results, language, and overall tone of the report do not agree with the point Randy was making. But I wouldn't take this study seriously even if it agreed with me, because the methodology was so poor; for the WW2 part, the sample group was asked to reflect upon an experience they'd had sixty years ago, as the data collected was all self reported, in the year 2000. Of a proposed sample group of 7,500, only 1123 people actually responded, making the sample size criminally small, given the scale of the war. For some reason, German soldiers were excluded entirely, without explanation. Problematically, the questions within the survey this tiny, tiny sample size was asked to answer were geared exclusively and specifically toward christianity (for example, when asked "what is your favorite book?" answers of "the bible" were coded as a religious response, whereas any other religious text was to be coded as a non-religious response). So, you know, take all that with a grain of salt.

But hey, you know which group of people scored the highest on church attendance? Non-veterans. Those who did not experience combat during the war. The level of church attendance, when compared to those who experienced no danger at all, actually goes down. Yes, there are differences in church attendance based on the intensity of combat experienced (though it's worth noting that no effort was gone to to establish whether these soldiers were atheists or theists before entering combat) but overall, the number goes down, not up. Like I said, I wouldn't take this study seriously for a number of reasons, but that fact alone disproves what Randy is trying to say, and he does take the study seriously.

And as one final cherry on top, one final demonstration of the dishonesty with which Randy is conducting himself, why not look at the wikipedia page he cites? Here it is. Oh, and what's this? To get to the paragraph on the study that he quoted, Randy had to scroll past and ignore a section entitled "notable counterexamples." In fact, the study itself is a part of that section.