https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...lar-kids-study

One step for crushing the myth of the 'love' in christianity. The only thing i can see it causes hatred for others and yourself.

Nobody should be allowed to enter a church or read a bible, unless he reached adult age.

I'm sure someone will attack the validity of the study, but the results make sense to me and aren't that surprising.

I read the report from http://www.cell.com/current-biology/...15)01167-7.pdf.

It's an interesting study. I liked that they controlled for in-groups / out-groups and tested both for altruism and punitive tendencies. They used a solid sample and from a good selection of cultures. The researchers are also solid names.

However, there are a few objections I would pose.

1.) pro-social is a bit of a "cheater's term". It's typically defined as "behavior that helps others", which sounds good - but it can be a bit wishy washy. For example a study can define giving money to beggars as "pro social" because it "helps others", but this omits that people might not be giving money to beggars because they want to help others (for example by not wanting to support organized recruitment of beggars). As you see from this example, pro-social doesn't necessarily translate to "less moral" or "selfish". But it sounds like it does, which is why I usually dub it a bit of a "cheater's term".

2.) In this study altruism towards anonymous recipients is seen as pro-social because it directly benefits them, but the children might not necessarily be more selfish - perhaps they are more accustomed to rewards as opposed to hand-outs.

3.) Using less acceptance for punitive tendencies as a form of "pro-social" behavior is also mis-leading. It is perfectly reasonable to think that these children are reared to believe that punishment serves a greater good.

So in short: The study is solid, the names are solid, the methods are solid - but this cleverly disguises that the the entire term "pro-social behavior" is often misunderstood to mean "morally good", which isn't as clear-cut as the people in this field often want you to believe.

seems like you are believing that there is a conspiracy behind it? pro-social means for me a child, that likes to see their immidiate social enviroment happy. Remember a child doesnt think in terms of what this actions will cause in the long run

Therfor i dont believe the religious children think punishment "is for the greater good", but are little monsters which love the punishment for the sake of it.

The study matches perfectly with my everyday experiences, especially the GOP being a christian party and on the same time the party for crazy violent people.

Chomsky just called them the "most dangerous organisation in human history"

I'm a social psychologist, so my objections are academic. "Pro-social behavior" is a sound term in a vacuum, but easily misunderstood and often misrepresented. It is very hard (and usually wrong) to translate it to "morally superior", and that particular detail is often omitted in press releases and abstracts.

For example, it could easily be defined as pro-social to climb into a car and help strangers find their way around town (it is an action intended to help others), but you wouldn't teach your child to do it - and it wouldn't reflect negatively on a child that he refused to do it - but if you followed the definition we applied, the child has now refused to engage in pro-social behavior.

i respect your degree and your example.

however, i think that the cases where "pro-social behaviour" that are also "morally superior" greatly outnumber the cases where "anti-social behaviour" is "morally superior".

Just think at all the christians who think that global warming is just gods will or something. The damage done by christians to our western society should make its way into public discussion.

I agree that religion is a bad platform for challenging science, and I also think it is a poor reason for moral views (since it is so easy to excuse anything with an appeal to "divine authority").

But I think we should be careful when extrapolating from studies to slam religion. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but we have to hold it to a very high standard when we do. By all accounts I can find, this looks like a very solid study - but there are some objections / controversies I think it is important to illuminate. But it is perfectly legitimate to state that we want children to be more altruistic towards strangers, but we have to acknowledge that we have moved from the descriptive science to a moral judgment.

The subject line "Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts" appears to be inaccurate, unless I'm misunderstanding the study. The measured difference is not in "meanness", i.e that religious children are meaner, but in perceptions of meanness and the appropriateness of various levels of punishment:

"judged interpersonal harm as more mean" is not the same as being mean, as far as I can tell. It does make sense intuitively that children raised in religious households have more punitive morals though, which I would probably agree is often undesirable, but they weren't measuring that religious kids are "meaner" than their secular counterparts.

I also wish there was a little more detail on the linear regressions based on SES and country of origin for the data on punishments. They report those regression results for generosity and parent-reported sensitivity to injustice but seem to omit them for the differences in punitive judgment. I'm not sure if I'm parsing this too closely, but I wonder if the differences there mostly just map to the background culture in the country of origin. That is, it's not too surprising that people in Jordan support much harsher punishments for perceived crimes than people in Canada. But that might tell you more about Jordan than about (for example) Muslims in Europe. Obviously the cultural milieu can't be separated from religion, but it's obviously a very important factor.

In some ways, I think it would be useful to see the comparisons broken down by country, but they probably don't have the sample sizes.

I could swear that this has already been posted here, but I can't seem to find it. Maybe someone else can use the search function to locate it.

Though it is reminiscent of something that was posted a while ago: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...-real-1592175/. The article that starts the thread basically points to the possibility that the belief in a punitive God helped to foster in-group cooperation which helped to advance civilization.

And that idea of punitive justice is certainly a systemic piece of most religious perspectives.

So it's not surprising to me that the conclusion of the study looks like this:

Probably, "sensitivity for justice" (similar in concept to the idea that there is a punitive God that judges behaviors) is established in a way that it's hard to separate out from its negative correlation with "altruism." But I would have to defer to tame_deuce's reading of the article because it's not my area and I don't have the time to work my way through it.

The study had 43% Muslims in it, which is a vicious barbaric religion as practiced in most areas of the world (harsh punishments, xenophobia, extreme misogyny are mainstream in Islam). Kind of invalidates the results.

This bit was hilarious, though:
That's quite a stretch. Religions create not only individual beliefs but societies and social moralities as well. There's a reason the Islamic world stayed horrifically barbaric (widespread open child sex slavery, for example), while the Western world reformed and found enlightenment. Religion, I would argue, had a lot to do with it.

no. it distinguishes between muslims and christians. are you lying or arent you able to read properly?

Enlightment created the western world, christians are just a relict from the past, and a pretty unnecessary one if you ask me.

Christians don't fare badly in this; the headlines are mostly created by the results from Islam.
Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other, dissolution, or subjugation to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old traditional remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed. But as the evil unfolds, it leads to anarchy, thence, inevitably, to a new tyranny, producing a new synthesis secured by a new system of dogma.

Did you look at the study or just the article? The gap between Christianity and non religious is bigger than the gap between Christianity and Islam on Generosity and is similar on Judgments of meanness.

the christians differ strong enough from the non-religious, so that i would say the results are significant.

Our tradition is enlightment, not christinarity.

Enlightment itself has created a tradition, it is wrong to think that all enlightment will end in super-individualisation (like max stirner), instead democracy needs enlightend individuals (which will be atheists in most cases or something similiar) working together to function.

There is "evil" in the world no doubt. But its not like in the 30s where Nazi-germany was the obvious evil. Instead the looming dangers are from multiple nature and have complex reasons.

That doesnt mean the problem isnt solvable, but it requires alot of insight to understand whats going on. At least most people notice that the path we are going right now is propbaly a dangerous one to say the least.

And since the GOP is a somewhat christian party, christianarity is part of the problem and not a solution.

Totally solid logic there... Generalizing from an arbitrary aspect of a collection of people like that? Sheer brilliance.

its called an abduction i guess. if christianarity would stand trial i think the evidence would lead to a conviction

Congratulations on your use of terminology.

You are welcome to believe what you will about the strength of your argument. But it's worth noting that Christianity is also prevalent in the Democratic party, especially strong among the black population. In order for your abductive reasoning to be successful, you would have to have an argument sufficiently robust to explain why black Christianity "doesn't count" in your argument. Unless you're also making an indictment of Democratic party in the same broad terms that you're indicting the Republican party.

Alternatively, you can assent to the idea that picking an arbitrary feature of a group and attempting to generalize from that is usually a flawed way to do this sort of reasoning.

No it does not, as the study solidly affirms the trend is there in children from Christian households as well.

I suggest letting criticism be based on the actual paper instead of your imaginary version of it.

Do you think that Angela Merkel is the leader of the free world these days?

alright, got the point.

still there is the study from the OP, saying there is something wrong with christians.

no. while angela merkel did a somewhat decent job with the refugee thing, i think she is exploiting a lot of other countrys in the EU for germanys profit.
Germany has to stop sacrificing the economy of other nations to gain an advantage, or the EU will fail very soon.
Had Le Pen won the election in France, the EU would propably be history already. A lot of countrys in the EU are pissed of because of germanys egoism

Where do you think the Enlightenment came from? Would the Enlightenment have happened under Islam, with its misogyny toward women and ingrained xenophobic worldview toward non-Muslims? Would it have happened under Hinduism, with its bizarre Gods? Would it have happened in Rome, with its weird polytheist religion and general atheism?

The Enlightenment has inherent in it a good number of Judeo-Christian values, whether you like Christianity or not (personally I think you have to pretty low on awareness and philosophical sophistication to be a Christian in the modern age).

It's not really that. Traditions and similarity and shared beliefs bind communities together.

He's not using evil in the sense of "evil", he says "the evils inherent in its dissolution [of tradition]" - he's talking about the fact that social glue is something born of a rigidity that encourages and enforces group good over individual choices. Europe would likely not have developed the way it did without the glue of Christianity.

tame_deuces has already warned you about interpreting the results carefully, and I recommend you go back and read it again.

In the end, I suppose I really can't stop you if you want to go for the sensationalist approach to science. Usually, the best approach to studies like these is to wait for more data and actually actively look for contrary data. Especially in psychology and anything related to children, it's very difficult to make large scale extrapolations from a single study. This stuff is super-complicated with a ton of confounding factors.

I sort of thought it was the other way around. "Morally good" is the wishy washy term that people map all sorts of personal views onto. "Pro-social behavior" is the more concrete social psych term that means specific things we can measure. The problem then wouldn't be the authors disguising things - they are using the correct term in the correct way - it would be others interpreting this to mean their own versions of whatever they think "morally good" is?

(I didn't read the paper, only going off your comments here so I might be way off base here)

Well, let's assume we make no leap in moral judgment and just keep it in the descriptive.

Then I say that accepting certain punitive tendencies is pro-social, because it benefits society as a whole (serving to deter anti-social behavior) and I apply this study's data. Now I have shown a positive correlation between religiosity and pro-social behavior using the same data-set, and that the children reared in irreligious homes are less prone to engage in pro-social behavior.

So yes, pro-social is more strictly defined, but if kept strictly in the descriptive it won't say much.

He is blinded by meanness for Islam showing the secular world has its issues too.