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Here's a discovery that could make secular parents say hallelujah: Children who grow up in non-religious homes are more generous and altruistic than children from observant families. ...
A series of experiments involving 1,170 kids from a variety of religious backgrounds found that the non-believers were more likely to share stickers with their classmates and less likely to endorse harsh punishments for people who pushed or bumped into others.
The results "contradict the common-sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind toward others," according to a study published this week in the journal Current Biology.
Worldwide, about 5.8 billion people consider themselves religious, and religion is a primary way for cultures to express their ideas about proper moral behavior — especially behavior that involves self-sacrifice for the sake of others.
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(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Sunday November 08 2015, @05:06PM
Worse, there's a figurative get-out-of-jail free card in the form of either atonement (confess sins and be forgiven for minor ones), or "God will be the judge" when you reach the afterlife... i.e. after the world you lived in is no longer able to punish you for transgressions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @12:02PM
The idea of punishment is particularly religious, actually, and it behooves us to lose it in favor of concern for optimizing human behaviors, both at individual and aggregate levels. Nothing is gained by anyone by punishing someone, in and of itself, though one may argue that it discourages others (which does not seem to be the case, going by recidivism figures by justice system and the effects of cutting sentences in Europe to reduce prison loading (zero effect on anything else)), in itself ethically dubious as it instrumentalizes humans for the purpose of "making an example", and practically dubious as it fails to correct behavioral issues, instead relying on imposing an artificial disincentive through public spending so the entrained patterns don't manifest.
Nietzsche voiced the opinion that one might imagine a society so powerful (which we may take as "well developed and wealthy") that it need not punish wrongdoing. I would argue that the Scandinavian countries offer an early example of precisely such a constructive approach, though it's not quite there yet. Studies on feedback mechanisms show positive feedback has a greater utility than negative feedback, too. In short, everything I've seen seems to support the idea that a hole in your wall cannot be removed using a chainsaw, but must rather be filled with substance; in this analogy, that punishment is a dysfunctional relic whose only remaining function is to indulge vengeful sadism, which is a rather common cause of crime in the first place and probably not something we want to collectively endorse.
Let's build better people.