If evidenced based thinking & anti-magical based thinking = bigotry, then I'll quite happy be labelled a bigot, or at least your definition of bigotry. Although that would be an interesting definition of bigotry.
The interesting point I take by the psychologist you reference is that he was talking about adults. Whereas the study is about children. So you have committed the logical fallacy of introducing a combination of a strawman & red herring.

Here's a balanced take on the study from a science publication, as opposed to the socialist Guardian newspaper:

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2015/11/nonreligious-children-are-more-generous

The last few paragraphs do put things in context:



Certainly opens up some interesting questions for further research, and of course will need to be replicated. Predictably, this doesn't prevent anti-religious bigots like the OP from drawing stone-cold conclusions from one study. Equally, the headline obsessed modern media doesn't understand (or refuses to understand) the concept of scientific replication.

FTR I'm agnostic, so don't particularly care either way. But it's interesting that lefties are given carte blanche to attack certain institutions or groups in society by making sweeping generalisations, while simultaneously crying racism, sexism etc if their precious sacred cows are even mildly critiqued . Social justice warriors are experts at selective tolerance, just as hypocritical and bigoted as hardline religious types. The OP fits this description perfectly.

Grew up in a church community which I left at about 18/19 after not giving a shit since I was 16, so i've seen it both ways...

For the most part, kids I knew from evangelical families were nicer kids, but that's just my experience. As a teenager, it was difficult and I remember people making up this so called 'judgement' that Christians supposedly dished out on the reg :lol:
I've always hated the term 'judge' because it means fucking nothing. We form opinions of everyone we meet and those opinions are rescaled by everything we know about a person. Anyone who doesn't agree with our actions or doesn't act the same as us is seen to be 'judging' us, which is just fucking bullshit. Anyone who uses the term 'judging' in my eyes is pretty childish and really lacks credibility.

Anyway, that's just my little rant, than can apply to anyone in any context, not just a religious context.
I think 'Christian' children are 'better' kids. I think Christian teenagers suck for the most part. Again, I'm just going off what I saw growing up as a very behaviour conscious person.

Most Catholics I know have a strong sense of social justice. I certainly got this from my parents and other members of my family and community.

Unfortunately they taught me too well.

I stopped being a Catholic when I realised the church bureaucracy had long ago stopped believing in the message of love, tolerance and anti-greed that Jesus preached. (And also when I realised that the resurrection story was probably a bunch of crap. But the other one is far more important.)

According to idiots like Pell, God loves you and made you just the way you are...

...except if you're gay.
Or a woman who wants to break free of oppressive gender norms.
Or if you want (or need) to have an abortion.
Or if you want to have sex before marriage.
Or if you're someone who wants to use a condom to prevent STD's.

In which case the church will still love you... but you are a terrible person for making God so mad. Repent!

And before people say 'but Pope Francis is better!", well, yes he is. On a few issues. But deep down he still believes some of the same old rubbish - or at least much of the rest of the church does.

Edited by lastbroadcast: 13/11/2015 10:44:54 PM

Why don't you ever talk about football? Fuck off to a politics forum.

No. People are people, their belief of the reason that we are on this earth has no correlation with the amount they tease others when they are kids.

People are people, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. Lots of religious people and children of religious people are mean. Lots of religious people and children of religious people are lovely. Lots of atheist people and children of atheist people are mean. Lots of atheist people and children of atheist people are lovely.

Religious ≠ kinder/moral

Religious ≠ nastier/immoral

Drawing inferences one way or the other is a bit silly.

Having been raised Catholic (and lapsed), I found there to be all sorts of elements both in terms of Catholics and in terms of the church, in general.

For instance, there were many snobbish ones who had this awful superiority complex and didn't care a toss about people in less fortunate circumstances than others. At the level of the Church, itself, I found this to be reflected by the attitude and behaviour of people such as Pell.

On the other hand, I also encountered many people/kids who were brought up to believe that they are morally obliged to improve the lives of others as much as they can. I went to a Jesuit school and that was very much the ethos of the school. The school strongly encouraged us to spend a couple of hours per week volunteering by tutoring refugee kids or by playing sport with kids with special needs. This is reflected by the attitude of people like Frank Brennan SJ, Father Bob McGuire, Sheikh Wesam Charkawi and countless others. At the very least, elements of various religious organisations are genuinely altruistic.

Just treat others as you wish to be treated, try to make others lives better where possible (whether that means sacrificing your money or your time), try to be compassionate, try not to judge others (within reason) and try to learn from your mistakes. It doesn't matter if you're Buddhist, Lutheran, CofE, Catholic, Presbyterian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, agnostic or atheist.

What I actually find depressing is when religious people who are genuinely caring and act well toward others attribute their good behaviour to the bearded man in the sky, rather than just realise that they are themselves responsible for the good and bad that they do.

"Religion as crutch" is just so pathetic to witness in my opinion.

Shocking.

Religion is the denial of reality. Essentially applying God to the things people do not understand or refuse to accept.

I take the statements you quoted to basically mean that religious parents live in denial. It could be argued that religious belief is a denial of mortality, so no surprise.

Having dated a religious girl and been around a church community this is so fucking true

Here is the paper

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(15)01167-7.pdf

Children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households, according to a new study.

Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.

They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.

“Overall, our findings ... contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.

“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”

Almost 1,200 children, aged between five and 12, in the US, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa participated in the study. Almost 24% were Christian, 43% Muslim, and 27.6% non-religious. The numbers of Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic and other children were too small to be statistically valid.

They were asked to choose stickers and then told there were not enough to go round for all children in their school, to see if they would share. They were also shown film of children pushing and bumping one another to gauge their responses.

The findings “robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households”.

Older children, usually those with a longer exposure to religion, “exhibit[ed] the greatest negative relations”.

The study also found that “religiosity affects children’s punitive tendencies”. Children from religious households “frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, it said.

Muslim children judged “interpersonal harm as more mean” than children from Christian families, with non-religious children the least judgmental. Muslim children demanded harsher punishment than those from Christian or non-religious homes.

At the same time, the report said that religious parents were more likely than others to consider their children to be “more empathetic and more sensitive to the plight of others”.

The report pointed out that 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious. “While it is generally accepted that religion contours people’s moral judgments and pro-social behaviour, the relation between religion and morality is a contentious one,” it said.

The report was “a welcome antidote to the presumption that religion is a prerequisite of morality”, said Keith Porteous Wood of the UK National Secular Society.

“It would be interesting to see further research in this area, but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently depending on their worldview.”

According to the respected Pew Research Center, which examines attitudes toward and practices of faith, most people around the world think it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person. In the US, 53% of adults think that faith in God is necessary to morality, a figure which rose to seven of 10 adults in the Middle East and three-quarters of adults in six African countries surveyed by Pew.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/religious-children-less-altruistic-secular-kids-study