{"id":182258,"date":"2015-11-06T21:12:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-07T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/11\/06\/i-care-not-much-for-a-mans-religion-whose-dog-and-cat-are-not-the-better-for-it\/"},"modified":"2015-11-06T21:12:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T02:12:00","slug":"i-care-not-much-for-a-mans-religion-whose-dog-and-cat-are-not-the-better-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/11\/06\/i-care-not-much-for-a-mans-religion-whose-dog-and-cat-are-not-the-better-for-it\/","title":{"rendered":"I Care Not Much for a Man&#8217;s Religion Whose Dog and Cat Are Not the Better for It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Abraham Lincoln said that, and a recent research implies that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/news\/science-and-technology\/21677613-far-bolstering-generosity-religious-upbringing-diminishes-it-matthew-2239\">generosity and religiously are antithetical<\/a>:<br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">An argument often advanced for the encouragement of religion is that, to paraphrase St Matthew\u2019s report of Jesus\u2019s words, it leads people to love their neighbours as themselves. That would be a powerful point were it true. But is it? This was the question Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, asked in <a href=\"javascript:void(0)\">a study<\/a> just published in Current Biology.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">Dr Decety is not the first to wonder, in a scientific way, about the connection between religion and altruism. He is, though, one of the first to do it without recourse to that standard but peculiar laboratory animal beloved of psychologists, the undergraduate student. Instead, he collaborated with researchers in Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa and Turkey, as well as with fellow Americans, to look at children aged between five and 12 and their families. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited 1,170 families for their project, and focused on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families described themselves as Muslim, 280 as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu. A further 323 said they were non-religious, 3 were agnostic and 2 ticked the box marked \u201cother\u201d.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">The upshot was that the children of non-believers were significantly more generous than those of believers. They gave away an average of 4.1 stickers. Children from a religious background gave away 3.3. And a further analysis of the two largest religious groups (Jews, Buddhists and Hindus were excluded because of their small numbers in the sample), showed no statistical difference between them. Muslim children gave away 3.2 stickers on average, while Christian children gave away 3.3. Moreover, a regression analysis on these groups of children showed that their generosity was inversely correlated with their households\u2019 religiosity. This effect remained regardless of a family\u2019s wealth and status (rich children were more generous than poor ones), a child\u2019s age (older children were more generous than younger ones) or the nationality of the participant. These findings are, however, in marked contrast to parents\u2019 assessments of their own children\u2019s sensitivity to injustice. When asked, religious parents reported their children to be more sensitive than non-believing parents did.<\/span>&nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;It appears that no one&#8217;s dog cat is better for their owner&#8217;s religion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Abraham Lincoln said that, and a recent research implies that generosity and religiously are antithetical: An argument often advanced for the encouragement of religion is that, to paraphrase St Matthew\u2019s report of Jesus\u2019s words, it leads people to love their neighbours as themselves. That would be a powerful point were it true. But is it? &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1021,1058,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-sociology","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}