Originally posted by Grand-Moff-Gav
Don't be too sharp in your criticism, as they say "a house divided upon itself cannot stand".Then again, I can tell you don't want to live with these "militant-@ssholes" as you term them.
Your last point depends on the definition of moral, which are right which are wrong, absolute or relative etc etc. Though you could say more atheists follow what they consider to be moral I guess...(if thats your hypothesis)
It wasn't my hypothesis. I'll try to dig up the thread. Here we go:
http://www.killermovies.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=479017&highlight=title%3A%28moral%29+forumid%3A80
Also, it should be noted that the "militant a-holes" isn't my term. I like a lot of them, and agree with most. I just think they approach the subject of religion incorrectly. So I'm not criticizing atheism. I'm criticizing atheists who turn it into their version of a holy war, and consider themselves at all superior. I can, for example, agree with nearly everyting Richard Dawkins says....yet give a hearty facepalm when he attempts to coin the term "bright" to describe an atheist, with a clear negative connotation towards others.
Anyway, here's the relevant part of the thread I linked you to:
Originally posted by DigiMark007
Perhaps the biggest myth concerning atheism is that morality becomes an "anything goes" attitude without a god-figure to keep a person in check. For example, a July 1995 poll of 1,007 adults published in George Barna's 1996 Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators found that 60% of Americans believe atheism has a generally negative influence on society. But as it turns out, this hypothesis is testable, and has been tested by numerous credible sources.- a 1934 study by Abraham Franzblau found a negative correlation between acceptance of religious beliefs and three different measures of honesty.
- In 1950 a survey of thousands was conducted by Murray Ross, and found that those who considered themselves agnostics or atheists were more likely to express willingness to aid the poor than those who considred themselves deeply religious.
- A 1969 report (Hirschi and Stark) that analyzed a multitude of crime and cultural data found no significant different in the likelihood of committing crimes between children who attended church regularly and those who did not.
- A 1975 report (Smith, Wheeler, & Diener) reported no difference in religious/non-religious college-age students when measuring how likely they were to cheat on tests.
- A similar report from 1962 (Middleton & Putney) reports a noticeable increase in cheating among religious students.
- David Wulff's 1991 novel Psychology of Religion compiles dozens of studies to this affect and finds a positive correlation between "religious affiliation, church attendance, doctrinal orthodoxy, rated importance of religion, and so on" with "ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, social distance, intolerance of ambiguity, and specific forms of prejudice, especially against Jews and blacks" (219-220).
To my knowledge, none of the researchers cited are atheists. All are researchable for those who wish to see the exact methods and results. It does not prove that atheism or spirituality makes one more moral than the other, but it shows irrefutable evidence that not only that atheism can be moral, but most atheists are moral. But the data is clear: not only does religion not ensure a heightened morality over non-religion, but it is statistically correlated with higher occurrences of immorality.