Far from bolstering generosity, a religious upbringing diminishes it
economist.com
economist.com
Religious ~3 stickers of 10
Non Religious ~4 stickers of 10
"This is only one result, of course. It would need to be replicated before strong conclusions could be drawn. But it is suggestive"
Poor article, poor study. It is pretty much link bait
The study makes a distinction between the 'big three' of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, but anyone with even a cursory knowledge on the matter knows that there are sects and divisions within those overarching categories that are worlds apart.
I think what this study shows is that religious belief isn't necessary for moral behavior. But that's a question of epistemology, not a question of ontology. Said another way, people can be awesome people, but still lack a 'grounding in being' for their values.
Interestingly, studies looking at 2 or 3 year-olds in bilingual households show that the child's development on either language is delayed compared to monolingual peers IIRC, but later comparisons at around age 6 show their use of language is at least as good, in both languages. The same phenomenon could at least conceivably be true in religious households.
Through the refugee crisis in Europe, it is pretty clear that churches and mosques are doing a lot of volunteer relief work. On the macro scale it breaks down though, it is absolutely not the most religious countries (Poland) that gives shelter to the most refugees.
One thing non-believers report missing the most is a community.
However there is a definitely a difference with regard to in-group and out-of-group behavior with religious groups, where most of the generosity is directed in-group only.
I suspect that this group-oriented behavior is responsible for 100% of the difference found in the study.
Non-believers are not oriented toward in/out groups so much (presumably because they do not have a built-in group, so the concept is not mentioned much).
I suspect if you redid the study and had some kids be told "the other kids goes to the same xxx as you", (and others not told) you would find some very interesting results.
I suspect the in-group generosity of the religious kids would go up much more, compared to the in-group generosity of the non-believers.
I would have given the benefit of the doubt before this study.
Based on the huge sample size of my two children I cannot fathom how religious upbringing could make them more altruistic than they are.
They share things, because they want to be nice to other people. They have different sensibilities - one is more altruistic than the other - but basically we try to teach to both of them the right thing by asking what they think the other person would feel. Simple as that.
It probably couldn't.
What it can do is take a parent who would not teach such things to their children and make them into a parent who does.
What it did do is take a world that did not think that way, and make it into a world that does think that way.
The history of the actions of religions is not always "clean" (the in-group out-of-group thing I mentioned), but the history of the thought is, and that influenced the world more than the deed.
Do you have any sort of a citation on that?
For example: http://www.reviewjournal.com/life/religion/atheist-church-pr... and http://nymag.com/news/features/46214/
What was claimed upthread was "One thing non-believers report missing the most is a community."
That's a very different claim from what you ask to be defended, "most non-believers miss a community."
The second statement doesn't imply how badly the community is missed, the first explicitly states it's the most missed thing.
"most non-believers" also implies a smaller percentage of the group than simply saying "non-believers".
No one would say "christians believe dancing is immoral", but they would say "christians believe in God".
The reason is the implication is wrong. There are denominations to that do believe dancing is immoral, but it would be more accurate to say "some", or "many". Whereas the second sentence would be considered more accurate since you would probably be hard pressed to find a christian who didn't believe in God.
The short and sweet of it is that if he didn't mean to imply most non-believers than he should probably clarify that because the language, as is, very strongly implies it.
The former claims that (some) non-believers claim to miss community the most (of all the things they miss about religion.)
The latter claims that most non-believers claim to miss community.
They aren't similar but of different strength, they are fundamentally different. One is a claim about how much (relative other missed things) community is missed by an unspecified subset of nonbelievers, the other is a claim about how frequently (without reference to relative placement) community is missed by nonbelievers.
I'd say that, if anything, the latter is the stronger claim, in that former is true if any of the many millions of nonbelievers misses community more than they miss any other aspect of religion, while latter is only true if an absolute majority of nonbeliever miss the community of religion at least some amount.
At this point there's no reason to continue with this conversation. The basis of your argument is flawed, but you're not likely to see it, and I'm not likely to give you any leeway with respect to the (some) interpretation.
So lets stop here.
I understand us to be discussing the phrase, "One thing non-believers report missing the most is a community."
I would paraphrase, "If you survey non-believers, asking them what they miss most, one thing that shows up is community." I would include a pragmatic expectation that it shows up a non-negligible portion of the time, or else we shouldn't be bothering to mention it; but certainly no expectation that it be a majority or even plurality.
So... not very altruistic, then.
"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 “other”.
So the sample size is 1,170 and then the article talks about five hundred and ten? What happened to the other six hundred and sixty participants?