adamNJ Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 The abstract of a 2014 peer-reviewed study in the journal Plos One reported: American participants intuitively judged a wide variety of immoral acts (e.g., serial murder, consensual incest, necrobestiality, cannibalism) as representative of atheists, but not of eleven other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups. These findings demonstrate a prevalent intuition that belief in God serves a necessary function in inhibiting immoral conduct, and may help explain persistent negative perceptions of atheists. Recently the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has published its mammoth study on Religion in America based on 35,000 interviews... According to the Pew Forum a whopping 37% of atheists never marry as opposed to 19% of the American population, 17% of Protestants and 17% of Catholics. The typical no-faith American donated just $200 in 2006, which is more than seven times less than the amount contributed by the prototypical active-faith adult ($1500). Even when church-based giving is subtracted from the equation, active-faith adults donated twice as many dollars last year as did atheists and agnostics. In fact, while just 7% of active-faith adults failed to contribute any personal funds in 2006, that compares with 22% among the no-faith adults. The research survey of 1535 people, conducted by the Australian National University, revealed that belief in evolution is associated with moral permissiveness. Darwin himself apparently feared that belief in evolution by the common man would lead to social decay. The survey showed that people who believed in evolution were more likely to be in favour of premarital sex than those who rejected Darwin’s theory. Another issue which highlighted the contrast between the effect of evolutionary ideas and that of biblical principles was that Darwinians were reported to be ‘especially tolerant’ of abortion. The first so called "bestiality/zoophile rights" group, called Equality for All, has its roots in secular Europe and formed in the '90s. It is located in the Czech Republic. According to a 2010 Eurobarometer poll, 16% of Czech citizens responded that "they believe there is a God" which the lowest rate among the countries of the European Union. And the list goes on and on... Sourcehttp://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism_and_moral_depravity Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Will Torbald Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 Wow when people believe in divine punishment they don't do as many bad things wow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slavik Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 ISIS? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goldenages Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 Its not surprising that religious people don´t do bad things because they fear divine punishment. But I guess there is more to say. Czechia, as an atheist country, keeps the borders closed for immigrants. This is not compatible with the claim that christian countrys do best in the migrant crisis. Fear of god as guide for moral behavior means less reason as guide for moral behavior. While reason never allows to initiate violence, god does. If anger overwhelms your reasonable mind and you do bad, you have the insight that it was bad when your brain rules again. As a believer its easier to justify your bad behavior. Its very easy for state power to exploit believers. Have a look at the idea of hell and purgatory: Sinners have to spent a certain time in purgatory in order to purge. But they also can purge already during lifetime, e.g. when they spend money to the church. Or when they purge on the torture rack. You can even tell the torturer that he does, in fact, a good thing when he tantalizes his victims, because they more they scream now the less time they will spent in hell. To make man believe that evil actions are in fact good actions can never be done with reason. You need religion for this. IS is a classical example. regards Andi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Donnadogsoth Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 Population A believes man is made in the image of God and thereby rational, principled, and loving, but also damaged by Original Sin and so inclined towards evil. Population B believes man is merely an animal of no consequence in the Universe. What kinds of societies will A and B respectively create? Individual actions may vary widely, but the general thrust of A will be to create a society that looks towards the future, develops its economy, and educates its young to discover the principles upon which the survival of the whole depends. That would give the society the equivalent of a living organism's physical geometry, and it would discover and employ principle, and survive. B's thrust would be to take its cue from the animal world. Again, individual actions, including those inspired by a legacy of an A-society, now overwhelmed by B-thinking, may vary widely, but the general thrust would be towards today. Being an ant is so much work, better to be a grasshopper and hop about in the Summertime. Why not screw animals? There is no such thing as human dignity. Why donate to charity?--everything ends in the Heat Death anyway. Why not commit suicide if your life sucks, there will be no penalty and the people around you will thank you for ridding them of your depressing presence. Such a society would not be able to discover principle as a mandate, it would not be able to muster the courage to defend itself from other societies, such as a dedicated and aggressive religious colonisation movement. Such a society would have the geometry of an inorganic thing--a dead thing. So, it will die. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Des Posted January 28, 2017 Share Posted January 28, 2017 Population A believes man is made in the image of God and thereby rational, principled, and loving, but also damaged by Original Sin and so inclined towards evil. Population B believes man is merely an animal of no consequence in the Universe. What kinds of societies will A and B respectively create? Individual actions may vary widely, but the general thrust of A will be to create a society that looks towards the future, develops its economy, and educates its young to discover the principles upon which the survival of the whole depends. That would give the society the equivalent of a living organism's physical geometry, and it would discover and employ principle, and survive. B's thrust would be to take its cue from the animal world. Again, individual actions, including those inspired by a legacy of an A-society, now overwhelmed by B-thinking, may vary widely, but the general thrust would be towards today. Being an ant is so much work, better to be a grasshopper and hop about in the Summertime. Why not screw animals? There is no such thing as human dignity. Why donate to charity?--everything ends in the Heat Death anyway. Why not commit suicide if your life sucks, there will be no penalty and the people around you will thank you for ridding them of your depressing presence. Such a society would not be able to discover principle as a mandate, it would not be able to muster the courage to defend itself from other societies, such as a dedicated and aggressive religious colonisation movement. Such a society would have the geometry of an inorganic thing--a dead thing. So, it will die. If the sentient animals in B realize that they are close to developing the medical panacea, and only accidents and murder threaten their lives, than they have a real, rational reward approximating "eternal life". This is enough to motivate a keen interest in "not being murdered", and the establishment of a no-murder society. A no-murder society is valueless, and a no-initiation-of-force society will be formed to get the value of not being shot dead, robbed to death or slapped on the ear to death. The society then designed by B will have morality which is more conducive to the survival of the individual sentient animals of B, than is the morality of A to the survival of the individual sentient animals of A. "A" will at times and in ways put god's will above my life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yakamaru Posted January 29, 2017 Share Posted January 29, 2017 This topic name amuses me to to end. Yay for being a degenerate. \o/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rventurelli Posted February 15, 2017 Share Posted February 15, 2017 it is not only that someone who fears God is less inclined to do evil -- you might be inspired to do good deeds by Jesus or whatever. Not everything that humans do is in self-interest or motivated out of fear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.2 Posted February 15, 2017 Share Posted February 15, 2017 I think this a flawed survey. Morality is subject to religion and belief. Asking people in a fundamentally christian country about who is moral does not prove much. Only that apparently America is still relatively Christian, which includes American Atheists. A Chinese or a Cambodian atheist probably would not agree with a Western atheist on any morals. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rventurelli Posted February 17, 2017 Share Posted February 17, 2017 I think this a flawed survey. Morality is subject to religion and belief. Asking people in a fundamentally christian country about who is moral does not prove much. Only that apparently America is still relatively Christian, which includes American Atheists. A Chinese or a Cambodian atheist probably would not agree with a Western atheist on any morals. I would say that Nietzsche was right in the sense that nothing is truly erased if it is not substituted. There are no true, one hundred percent atheists. There is always the vestige or the reference of the majority religion or the one you have been raised into. When someone is atheist, my belief that they are actually "post-Christian" or whatever the religion they stopped following or never really got into. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Varain Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 It is common sense that says a religious man or woman does not commit certain acts, whether or not of illegal nature, due to an implicit moral interdiction which comes from believing in God or gods, but that does not make sense when you put two and two together and take into account religious people commiting crimes. There is no basis for religiously-driven evolution of society in the sense that the teaching have stayed the same, but society advanced. Societal changes are due to Science and Technology and ,in extremis, philosophy's. Overall, human interaction has improved ,again, preponderantly due to the last 3. It is unquestionable that religious zealotism, along with it's self-imposed impoverishment would have crippled the entire society. Atheism has nothing to do with decadence. It is admirable, but It would be decadent for one's self if one's morality depended on not taking into account others. I.E. "God said that" , "God said this" , but without a clear frame of reference, this is inflexible and potentially harmful to others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kikker Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 The abstract of a 2014 peer-reviewed study in the journal Plos One reported: American participants intuitively judged a wide variety of immoral acts (e.g., serial murder, consensual incest, necrobestiality, cannibalism) as representative of atheists, but not of eleven other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups. These findings demonstrate a prevalent intuition that belief in God serves a necessary function in inhibiting immoral conduct, and may help explain persistent negative perceptions of atheists. Why you would quote the abstract instead of the conclusions on a wiki page is beyond me. "In sum, when reading a description of someone committing an immoral act, participants readily and intuitively assumed that the person was an atheist. Combined, these results demonstrate that Americans (even atheist Americans) intuitively assume that belief in God somehow inhibits people from engaging in immoral behavior. Interestingly, Experiment 5 suggests that people are skeptical of atheist morality specifically because atheists do not believe in God, not merely because atheists are not members of religious moral communities. Strikingly, these results were apparent even among MTurk participants, who tend to be less religious, on average, than Americans in general (see demographics presented in File S1). Although the present experiments only utilized American samples, previous polls [19] indicate that an association between religious belief and morality is by no means an exclusively American trend. Nonetheless, future research should seek to replicate the present studies in diverse populations worldwide. To this end, an initial pilot cross-cultural investigation reported in the Online Supplement replicated the effects of Experiment 1 among participants in India. Importantly, previous research [23] using the same experimental procedure demonstrates that these effects do not represent a general effect whereby any negatively valenced description is viewed as representative of atheists. The present findings, combined with previous research using this exact experimental paradigm [23], instead suggest that it is specifically immoral negative actions that are seen as representative of atheists, consistent with other evidence suggesting that many view belief in God as a prerequisite for morality [19]." Recently the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has published its mammoth study on Religion in America based on 35,000 interviews... According to the Pew Forum a whopping 37% of atheists never marry as opposed to 19% of the American population, 17% of Protestants and 17% of Catholics. Isn't in the source. The typical no-faith American donated just $200 in 2006, which is more than seven times less than the amount contributed by the prototypical active-faith adult ($1500). Even when church-based giving is subtracted from the equation, active-faith adults donated twice as many dollars last year as did atheists and agnostics. In fact, while just 7% of active-faith adults failed to contribute any personal funds in 2006, that compares with 22% among the no-faith adults. Link is broken. The research survey of 1535 people, conducted by the Australian National University, revealed that belief in evolution is associated with moral permissiveness. Darwin himself apparently feared that belief in evolution by the common man would lead to social decay. The survey showed that people who believed in evolution were more likely to be in favour of premarital sex than those who rejected Darwin’s theory. Another issue which highlighted the contrast between the effect of evolutionary ideas and that of biblical principles was that Darwinians were reported to be ‘especially tolerant’ of abortion. That is a quote from the site "creation" which quoted a 2000 newspaper which referred to a "recent study" from 1999 with 1646 participants. Moral permissiveness is defined as openness to premarital sex and abortion. The data shows a small correlation between accepting Darwin's theory and the permissiveness of those behaviors. The questions where framed as '"do you think it's wrong or not wrong to ..." The data also shows that stronger christian beliefs slightly correlate with an distrust of others while higher education and age slightly correlate with more trust, Darwinism has no correlation. The country at that time was 70% christian while 16% was described as non-religious. book The first so called "bestiality/zoophile rights" group, called Equality for All, has its roots in secular Europe and formed in the '90s. It is located in the Czech Republic. According to a 2010 Eurobarometer poll, 16% of Czech citizens responded that "they believe there is a God" which the lowest rate among the countries of the European Union. The site about "equality for all" doesn't exist. Or is irrelevant enough to be unfindable. And the list goes on and on... Source http://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism_and_moral_depravity You should read your sources once in a while.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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