Today’s Jesus and Mo singles out a new study (reference below), but first the strip:
Indeed! Well, I suppose Jesus and Mo could simply dismiss the study, which I’m going to examine soon. Or, they could say that without religion you don’t have a good foundation or basis for morality. But what would that mean if religious and nonreligious people behave equally morally? Who would care about where the morality comes form? Besides, as everyone besides theists seems to know, morality doesn’t come from religion in the first place, but is simply codified and buttressed by religion.
Below this strip the artist has written that “The boys are disturbed by this article,” but “this article” links only to a blurb for a new study in Science.The real article, which I think is free to access (link and reference at bottom) does indeed say what has disturbed Jesus so much. Here’s its abstract (my emphasis):
The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N = 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious and nonreligious participants did not differ in the likelihood or quality of committed moral and immoral acts. Being the target of moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on happiness, whereas committing moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on sense of purpose. Analyses of daily dynamics revealed evidence for both moral contagion and moral licensing. In sum, morality science may benefit from a closer look at the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of everyday moral experience.
So there’s your sense of “purpose,” Eric MacDonald! All you have to do to have that important “sense of purpose” is be moral, and, as you know, no god is required for that. And (I’ll check the data soon), it looks as if religious people don’t behave any more morally than heathens.
As I said, I’ll read the whole article this week and summarize it if it’s sufficiently interesting and solid.
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Hofmann, W., D. C. Wisneski, M. J. Brandt, and L. J. Skitka. 2014. Morality in everyday life. Science 345:1340-1343.
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I have heard/seen this other places. Conservatives think obeying authority is important as well as dwelling over sexual practices. Liberals have other emphases.
“Liberals have other emphases”.
Wine and cheese perhaps.
Fairness and justice actually.
Not mutually exclusive. 😎
Laugh, Bob.
Only when we’re not driving our Hybrids to Whole Foods Market so we can gather near the organic kale and talk about how much we hate business or how awesome we thought Stalin was or ways to turn catholic high school kids into gay, vegan socialists. Then we take some guns away from some suburbanites and we fed ex them directly to islamic fundamentalist members of the Cripps whom support the regime in North Korea.
‘Cuz that’s just how we roll.
You sound like a fun guy. Are you active in the war on Christmas?
The war on Christmas is too commercial. I’ve moved on to the war on dessert.
2,4,6,8, chocolate cupcakes do not taste great!
Can we just redefine “dessert” and keep the chocolate?
yup!
Change do not to don’t and it will scan better. Let’s grab our (pitch?)forks!
LOL
As a former Christian, who spent decades working in full time Christian ministry, one of the reasons I left ministry and Christianity, is that I realized Christians were really no different, no better, and no more moral than the non-religious.
I used to think that a Methodist minister would not tell a whopping lie. Then it happened to me and I realised that Methodist ministers are no better than anyone else. They are probably no worse either but I discovered, to my dismay, that my Methodist friends refused to believe that this could have happened.
I suspect that the man in question knew he would get away with it because nobody – within the church at least – would believe he had done it. But I could be wrong.
My own view is that people who are raised in such a way to believe in things in the absence of evidence are predisposed to accept falsehoods as acceptable. Not all the time, of course. And not about everything. But if you are credulous you are susceptible to falsehoods from others and from yourself. And when you add in the “but I am forgiven” opt-out clause, I would predict an increased level of lying.
I should have added that this is why “Religion poisons everything” rings true to me.
Agree. It might also be the case that those so raised are not aware they are actually lying when they are. A bit of fast foot work around the edges of the subconscious will do the trick. (If you don’t mind the mixed metaphor). Add to that the reinforcement from an environment full of co-conspirators, and you end up with a sublime “truthiness” out of thin air.
If you need religion to be moral, you might be a psychopath because brains with more activity in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala don’t need rules to stop us from harming others.
Absolutely. Why do religious people do good? Is it because it IS good, or because some outside force is compelling them to? Like fear of punishment (hell) or desire for reward (heaven). Classical conditioning, anyone?
Don’t tell me you get nervous when you hear someone claim to have left behind their ax-murderer days when they found Jesus. 😄
‘Those days were fun, but the Lord showed me it was wicked…’
Sadly it looks to be behind Science’s paywall. However will summarize the procedure. 1252 US or Canadian adults initially assesed for political and religious ideology. Then randomly pinged 5 time/day for 3 days about their moral experiences of the last hour (did you commit a moral/immoral act, did you witness one, did someone commit one on you, etc..). Respondents could answer on scale, not just yes/no, and could say N/A to any question. So the total data set was 13,0240 reports.
While I think Jerry has already bolded some of the real key findings, here’s a very brief summary of some other interesting findings:
1. People are more likely to report good acts done to them (vs. bad acts done to them, which they report less), but they are more likely to gossip about bad acts (vs. good acts) done to other people.
2. Self-identified liberals remember and report fair/unfair, liberty/oppression, and honest/dishonest moral acts more than others. Self-identified conservatives remember and report loyal/disloyal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation more acts more than others.
3. Very annoyingly, the two tables on religious vs. nonreligious did not make it into the print version, they’re in the on-line supplement. Grrrr. The textual description states that there was no discernable difference between the two groups in terms of number of experienced moral events or the type of events experienced and reported (this is in direct contrast with the political split, which was statistically significant). The article says that religious people experience more guilt, embarrassment, and disgust in response to immoral deeds they have committed, and more pride and gratefullness in good moral deeds they’ve committed or seen (but, as a reminder, the amount and type of moral/immoral deeds they commit is no different).
Anyway, that’s my 10-minute scan. I probably missed a bunch of good stuff but I expect Jerry will give it a much better treatment than I have here.
Thanks Eric. I tried to read it and couldn’t. I’m looking forward to Jerry’s analysis too. 🙂
It is unfortunate that two of the best tables/plots (point 3) are in the supplemental material (paywall):
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/09/11/345.6202.1340.DC1/Hofmann.SM.pdf
They do cite Harris (End of Faith) (kudos) but only as a matter of pointing out the popularity of the debate as to whether (or how or if at all) religion is the foundation of morality.
It is interesting how Christian notions of forgiveness square with Christian morality. I had a conversation with a rather fundamentalist member of my wife’s family. She asked me if I would rather do business with a Christian or an atheist. I said I’d pick the atheist every time. She was shocked and wondered why. I said that forgiveness is always at the Christian’s elbow and there are so many Christians who figure that if they’re OK with Jesus, that’s all that matters. How can you trust people like that?
Your thesis should be the subject of another study. Sounds quite defensible.
“Christians Aren’t Perfect–Just Forgiven.”
–Bumper sticker
But even that bumper sticker, which purports to show humility, hints that they’re close to perfect.
Every time I see that bumper sticker, I wish, just for once, that one of them would have the spine to put THE REST of that on their bumper sticker.
The whole quote should be, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. This gives us the right to do anything we F-ing please, and we don’t have to take responsibility for any of it.” L
How about we keep a permanent marker in the glove box…to help them with their weak spins.
Here’s an instructive video clip in which the freethinking Ulysses Everett McGill tries to school his fellow escapees:
Loved this movie!! First time I realized how well George C. could do deadpan comedy. Brilliant devil at the crossroads (Rob’t Johnson) riff.
There are some other rationales:
1) Christians are probably less inclined to treat non-Christians well than other Christians.
2) A Christian who wears his religion on his sleeve will feel less motivated to demonstrate his principles.
3) Most importantly, an admitted atheist, who generally does a disservice to himself with his honesty, demonstrates a higher degree of personal integrity than someone who conforms to the norm.
This is nothing new. Studies have had similar findings going back almost fifty years. Here are some examples:
Recently I had a long and frustrating discussion with a Christian apologist on the subject of morality. He will agree with the study, because according to him, objective morality comes directly from god and we all (believers and atheists) receive it – regardless of religion. As I said, frustating.
“The invisible and the imaginary look a lot alike.”
If you bump into that person, here’s one tactic. First report exactly the opposite of what the study showed – that religious people are far and away more moral than the nons. Then let the apologist crow about it for a while, and ask why he thinks the result would’ve gone that way.
After the foot has been planted in the mouth, is when your printed copy of the abstract comes out… and then you go… “oh whoops, waitaminnit… oh it actually says the opposite…”. Then watch the backpedaling. Then post on Youtube. 😉
The discussion took place as an email exchange. And do you really think we have to play tricks to see apologists backpedalling – lol?
The argument “if you are just made of molecules, why be moral?” came up a lot. And a bunch of other crap!
Nah, I would actually never, ever recommend that anyone else lie and trick to watch apologists backpedal. But it sure works great for me. 🙂
Actually… that it’s an e-mail exchange would make the bait and switch more plausible. ( A: “I think I remember…” followed by B: the mark’s armchair theorizing, then C: “ah, here’s the link… whoops!”) And fun will be had by all.
“Gotchas” with theists would indeed be fun.
I say “would” because theists never acknowledge the gotcha. While it might be fun for a bit to see how they try to explain away the gotcha, it soon becomes frustrating and depressing as you realize just how committed these people are to ignoring reality.
True, that. The best one could hope for, I suppose, would be to use the exchange as fodder for a well-produced comedy skit video – perhaps for “Funny or Die” or something.
I’m now imagining a game show skit called “Gotchas With Theists”. (anybody here know Alex Trebek personally?)
Religion seems to be more important to conservatives, so whenever I read about a political figure being caught in an illegal act, I check their party affiliation. Invariably, it’s Republican. Yeah, that’s their God-given morality in action.
It doesn’t take a study to show what is reinforced continuously in the media’s exposure of the duplicitous nature of many religious conservatives. They put on a good show of respectabilty and moral piety but in secret they do whatever it takes to further their ends.
Sorry, but I must disagree. Studies like this are necessary to confirm (or disconfirm) our hypotheses. That’s how we distinguish actual knowledge from anecdotes and folk wisdom.
And I disagree that religious conservatives put on a good show of respectability.
Many make a blatant show of unkind, non-empathic, bigoted behavior. And are proud to do so.
If it’s any consolation to the religious, they can cite this paper to argue that if religion poisons everything then why aren’t they worse than the nonreligious?
I think the ‘no difference’ is far more consolation to atheists and nonbelievers. It’s not us claiming some spiritual transformation occurs upon conversion, it’s the other folks. What this shows is that any claimed spiritual transformation has no effect on behavior. It’s like 19th century attempts to weigh the soul as it leaves the body – the evidence seems to indicate that there ain’t no ‘thing’ there to detect.
But they are worse: atheists are 1/10 of the expected prison population in US. Differences in outcome may be predicted by that prison and the pathways there isn’t everyday life, and religion is part of the poison. =D
Aren’t the better examples in this regard at the international level? If religious belief did strongly correlate to morality and pro-social behaviors, all other things being equal, one would expect more secular countries to exhibit elevated rates of crime, instability, etc. And we don’t see that in the aggregate.
The U.S. prison population is a less apt comparison, largely because it isn’t a representative cross-section of society. It’s weighted heavily toward folks who are economically disadvantaged, desperate, undereducated, and dispossessed–circumstances that don’t correlate to non-belief. Especially when we then add all of the peer and institutional incentives to espouse religion in prison, I’m not surprised to see that the reported proportion of atheists on the inside is significantly lower than it is on the outside.
Sweden is remarkably less religious – and less violent – than the U.S. More moral by almost any standard of measure, except … the typical U.S. fundie would see Swedes as immoral, evidenced by the sin of non-belief. Care to ride around that circle again?
🙂 Iceland, Singapore, and Japan also come to mind. I think The Brady Bunch had a higher murder rate than they do.
I should be careful about citing Japan as an irreligious country. It is something rather too many Western atheists do. Religion in Japan does not – in general (ie with the exception of groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Soka Gakkai) – take the wearing-it-on-my-sleeve form that it, as well as atheism, seems to do particularly in the States; and the fundamentally Shinto-Confucian plus a bit of Buddhism bedrock of Japanese religion does not result in the sort of answers you get when you ask Westerners, or others brought up in an Abrahamic religion, about their faith.
You make an excellent point. But however you define their “religiosity” you can walk around Tokyo at 3am in no danger of being mugged. I’d trade that for US Jeebus-worship 9 times out of 5.
You make an excellent point. But however you define their “religiosity” you can walk around Tokyo at 3am in no danger of being mugged. I’d trade that for US Jeebus-worship 9 times out of 5.
Hi, Tim. Fair enough. The same could probably be said of Singapore, as well. These came to mind mostly because of their extremely low violent crime rates, and comparative–but not overwhelming, as you note–secularism.
Excluding China (possibly), the biggest atheist demographics relative to population size tend to be found in Europe, especially Western and Central Europe. Coincidentally, these European countries also happen to be the places with the lowest crime rates, freest presses, biggest GDP per capita, highest acceptance of LGBT rights, etc., as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Even in the US, the New England states are kinda similar in these respects.
Of course, once you throw China back in, things get a bit iffy again. China’s certainly economically strong at present, as far as I can tell, but to pick an example, its press is not the freest by a long shot.
Well yes, but isn’t that simply because there are more religious people in the population as a whole?
No, given that “expected prison population” is based on the proportion of atheists in the population as a whole.
Meaning what? If rates of incarceration are the same for both populations, the prison will have the same ratio as the outside world. If religion is a factor, the populations inside could be different.
Right. If there is no difference between theists and atheists regarding moral/legal behavior, the proportions should be the same in and out of prison, within some statistically expected variation depending on sample size, etc.
Hi, GBJ. I have a couple of issues with this line of argument, but I’d like to put most of those aside and just focus on one thing.
You write: “If there is no difference between theists and atheists regarding moral/legal behavior, the proportions should be the same in and out of prison, within some statistically expected variation depending on sample size, etc.”
A reasonable hypothesis. The morality study in question, however, did find roughly “no difference,” and yet we see exactly what our hypothesis says we shouldn’t–a huge reported disparity (roughly a factor of 10) between proportional atheist populations inside and outside of prison. How do we reconcile these data?
My only initial thought is perhaps more of a cop-out than a reconciliation. Going back to my original point from yesterday, I just don’t think the prison population provides a useful surrogate for morality tied to belief/disbelief. I strongly suspect atheists tend to be selected out in the aggregate for reasons that correlate to, but are not the direct causes or results of, their atheism.
With more data and more analysis, of course.
You may be correct that other factors than religion account for the religious bias in prison populations. There may be some correlation-isn’t-causation phenomenon going on. My comment in response to reasonshark addressed the “more religious people in the population as a whole” statement.
That said, it is clear that religion doesn’t keep you out of prison.
A lot of religious people will argue, that atheists were simple lying about morality to make their group look better (Christians don`t lie because it`s forbidden in the 10 commandments).
But I found it`s the other way around. Christian people care more about how their group is viewed, so they`ll lie (but I admit that this is pretty subjective).
… or they`ll argue that the immoral people were not real scottish Christians.
Bingo! First thought that came to my mind also.
Well, in this study there was also no difference in the two groups’ reporting of moral/immoral acts done to them by other people and done to other people by other people. You’d expect a systemic bias to show up in those questions (for example, an atheist underrreporting the number of good acts done to them by religious people). Since there’s no difference, it’s pretty hard to claim either group is sytemically lying. Or maybe they both are. 🙂
One interesting side analysis I’ve just thought about is this: there is a significant correlation between political position and the types of moral acts reported. There is no correlation between religious position and the types of moral acts reported. Taken together, it seems to indicate that (at least in this sample group of ~1300 people) religious position is not a strong correlate of political position.
If by ‘religious position’ you simply mean atheist/theist.
While I don’t have rigorous science to back this up, I’d bet a lot of money that everyone here will have made the sane anecdotal observation I have, which is this: while lefties and righties are equally likely to be theists, you can make a pretty reliable prediction about what kind of theist a lefty or a righty is likely to be.
*same*
although I’ll take “sane”
I agree. I would be comfortable putting my money down beside yours. Altmeyer’s work is pertinent to this.
If by ‘religious position’ you simply mean atheist/theist
I mean whatever it is the authors of the study measured. This is not clear from the hardcopy version, because the sum total of what they say about that part of the methodology is: “Religiosity and political ideology were assessed during an intake survey upon study registration.”
They also say they used ecological monetary assessment (with a reference). Maybe their reference describses the intake survey in more detail, but for now, I unfortunately have to leave your question unanswered. What we can say is that religiosity (as measured by the survey) does not appear to correlated with political ideology (as measured by the survey).
Sorry, bad typo: ecological momentary assessment.
Ah, thanks for the link. I have an ethics class starting next week and I have an ugly feeling that something like this is going to creep in somewhere in discussion.
I clicked on the J&M link to up his/hers hit rate, so I guess I’m behaving morally (at least once in a while).
But I lost my bet to myself, my guess was that the study would be Ecklund’s ongoung attempt to skew statistics her (and Templeton’s) way, just pre-released partial data in a feel-good-meeting. Which, by the way, is statistically abysmal practice what I know of.
Don’t forget to check who’s defining what’s moral and what isn’t.
In this case it’s the survey participants themselves, but they also provided a text entry and the whole was analyzed two separate ways, an ‘at face value’ analysis and an independent assessment using an SME assessment of the entries.
But I would say the religiosity non-correlation is pretty solid given that they found a political ideology correlation. That says to me that there is no big systemic problem with the data that would cause it to find non-correlation even if there was one, beacuse they did find correlations to factors other than religiosity.
That morality predicts religious people’s “sense of purpose” is an important observation.
It is contextual with predicting religious people’s “sense of divine”, when elaborating putative moral acts they impute on their deities. That deliberation is made by similar parts of the brain as when people think about their own moral attitude!
“The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that’s been linked to self-referential thinking. The mPFC is more active when we think about our own mindsets than those of others. Epley found that it was similarly abuzz when the recruits thought about their own attitude or God’s, but lower when they considered the average American. The three images below show the differences in brain activity between the three tasks and you can see that the ‘God’ and ‘self’ scans had little to distinguish them.
The results suggest that similar parts of the brain are involved when we consider our own beliefs and those of God – Epley thinks this is why we end up inferring a deity’s attitudes based on those we hold ourselves.”
[ http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/11/30/creating-god-in-ones-own-image/ ; my bold]
Very interesting. That fits so well with other observations. Thanks for sharing.
A famous theist, albeit a fictional one, also came to the same conclusion:
“What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, pure and unblemished, not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes, we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe – God looks astonishingly like we do!” -G’Kar.
The results if those scans are of course entirely unsurprising given that one of (a) god’s primary functions is to bestow authority and power on that god’s earthly representative as the representative tries to get others to conform his it her desires.
“Do as I say!”
“Why?”
“Because Jesus wants you to!”
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the smaller letters on the iPhone 5 keypad?
Also, those typos came out of nowhere. I swear it was fine when I hit submit.
The idea that the purpose of religion is make us more moral is a new idea invented by accommodationists and mild religious apologists. Unapologetic theists like William F Buckley were pretty up front about the purpose of Christianity: it was to redeem us of our sins so we can get into heaven. Morality has nothing to do with it.
This is pretty much the thesis of the autobiographical book by Los Angeles religion reporter William Lobdell’s book “Losing My Religion”
(not to be confused with books with the same title by Vishwas Mudagal or Vishwas Mudagali and !*especially*! not to be confused with “Losing !*our*! religion” by S.E. Cupp)
Lobdell was very delighted to land the job as religion reporter for the L.A. Times and the more he covered it, the less convinced he was!!
(Full title: “Losing My Religion: How I Lost my Faith Reporting on Religion in America- and Found Unexpected Peace”).
I suppose one could break down this study more on specific religions. How to Sikhs stack up against Muslims? Buddhists against Christians?
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It seems to me that we actually should care where morality comes from. As Hume pointed out, it can’t come from pure reason. Moral emotions are passions, and as Hume put it, reason is the slave of the passions. The origins of those passions are probably the same in ourselves and other animal species. Our species just happens to be able to think more about what we’re feeling. The result has been, within limits, large variations in the expression of moral emotions. However, clearly, moral emotions exist because of the behavioral predispositions that give rise to them, and those predispositions exist because they evolved. Where else could they come from? That begs the question of what “purpose” morality really serves. Dawkins answered that question for us in “The Selfish Gene.” It doesn’t exist because it benefits the species as a whole and, in Dawkins opinion, it doesn’t even exist because it benefits the group. It exists because the associated behaviors have increased the odds that the relevant replicators would survive and reproduce. In other words, we all have morality, but it isn’t anything to brag about. In fact, we can’t get along without it. However, it’s expression is probably better thought of as something to worry about than something to be proud of.
I agree with what you have said here but, for humans at least (and perhaps some few other species), that is only one aspect of our morality. The other major aspect is cultural evolution and reasoning. To some extent we can fiddle with our own programming.
Well, here’s the obvious Truth: the faithful started out as less moral but their religion improved them. Meanwhile, we atheists were born on third base and think we hit a triple.
/snark
Some religious would quibble over what is considered an immoral act. After all, a loving gay relationship is… immoral? To many, yes. How about my typing on Rosh haShanah? Immoral! (If you’re Jewish.)
Just thinking out loud.
To some in the fundamentalist crowd, just thinking out loud will get you 20 lashes.
To some in the fundamentalist crowd, just thinking will get you 20 lashes.
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Being a theist does not make you a moral person, just like being an atheist or agnostic doesn’t make you immoral. It’s your behavior in large and small things by which you are judged by your fellow human beings. Lies, distortions of the truth, and deliberate mis-characterizations are immoral whether you think you have a deity looking over your shoulder or not.