These hypotheses were supported in two anonymous economic game experiments, one with a sample of university students and another with nonstudent adults. Comments??
Yes. Aren't we all scientists here or at least wannabe-scientists? Don't we all know that we're not supposed to jump to conclusions based on the findings of one rather small experiment? We should be talking about the statistical probability of the accuracy of these results, about the possible biases introduced by the researchers, innocently or fraudulently, about the true randomness of the samples, about the methodology. Not just about the results, which may be just exactly what someone with a lot of control over the experiment was hoping for. And believe me, I would be saying exactly the same thing if the results were just the opposite and supported my own bias. The experiment may have indeed been good scientific work, but it is only a start and it is not good science to put too much stock in one experiment.
Maybe you should write to them. Is there any evidence for prosocial behaviour in athiestic societies [apart from communism]?
I see Sam is at it again, trying to convince everyone that communism is an atheist philosophy, when in fact "To each according to his needs and from each according to his ability" is a quote from the Book of Acts. Communism is an offshoot of Christianity. Can you for one second imagine a Confucian, a Buddhist or a Jew preaching that what a man takes from the world does not have to correlate with what he gives back? Of course the university denizens with too much time and education and not enough work who were the leaders of the communist movement were atheists; most people of that demographic in any movement are atheists. But the rank and file were as religious as any other people. In fact I visited the Communist Bloc in its heyday and found that Christianity had deeper support in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria than it had in capitalist Western Europe or the USA.
Atheists tend to be rational people and rational people know intuitively that for a society to prosper, its economy has to produce a positive surplus, not a negative one.
So charity was created by the religious, interesting.
Charity is an instinctive behavior in a pack-social species like Homo sapiens. In order for the pack to survive, its members must care about each other and be able to depend on each other. TV wildlife specials are rife with scenes of pack-social animals doing heroic things for their pack-mates. I watched an African Wild Dog sneak into the research compound and drag his tranquilized buddy out before the scientists could draw a blood sample and snap a tag on him.
Our problems occur as we invent new technologies that allow and require us to congregate into larger packs than our instincts motivate us to maintain. The invention of agriculture forced us to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with people who weren't immediate family. Yet people in an agricultural village have to treat each other with the same charity shown by members of a small extended-family tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers, and for the same reason: Everybody needs everybody to survive and do their job for the village to prosper.
But the real crisis arose with the invention of civilization, for cities require us to extend that harmony and cooperation to complete strangers in order to make the city prosper. Today we've gone far beyond that: we have to stretch our pack-social instinct and extend charity to people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more than abstractions to us.
Obviously many of us are having trouble with that transcendence and it's understandable, because inside each of us still resides the spirit of a Mesolithic caveman who is suspicious of anyone outside his extended family. What's remarkable is that so many of us have actually made the transcendence and are lobbying our governments, donating to charities, and joining international forums, trying to find a way to not merely stop the killing of Iraqis, Georgians, Uighurs, Palestinians, Israelis, Sudanese, etc., but to help them achieve the same lifestyle that we have and become members of the same civilization. In other words we care about them, we want them to feel that they can depend on us: we feel charity toward them.
I'll grant you that in the early days of the Neolithic Era, religion may have helped the tribes get along... that is, to get along with tribes they were related to, who spoke similar dialects, had similar traditions, and on top of it prayed to the same gods. But somewhere along the way when the tribes got too big, religion became a liability and reinforced the feeling of "otherness" toward people who look different, practice different traditions, speak different languages, and pray to different gods. For the entire history of Christianity and Islam, the track record of those two Abrahamic faiths has been dismal. They've caused more dissension than harmony, killed far more people than they've helped, and obliterated three entire civilizations (Egypt, Inca and Aztec) in frenzies of genocide that would have warmed Hitler's heart.
In the old days, waaaaaaaay back, people might not have had organized religion, yet they might well have, and probably did have, empathy and compassion for their family and tribal members. But ....remember, tht was reseverved for only a select few, not the whole fuckin' human race as people these days try to claim!
Max is saying what I said, only, as usual, in fewer words.
I do think, however, that religious organizations probably extended that usual, limited ideal to apply to all those other stinkin', nasty people that no one seems to like or want!
But here's where I disagree with him. Christian communities did not extend charity to Jewish communities, and in fact persecuted them for the different values that sprang from their faith. (Most notably the lack of a proscription on lending money for interest that saved the European economy but made the Jews rich, and the tradition of cleanliness that minimized the ravages of the Plague in the
shtetls.) Catholic and Protestant communities didn't even treat each other charitably, and neither did Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities. Christian and Jewish Americans happily enslaved the Africans that were supplied in chains by devout Muslims on the other side of the Atlantic, and proudly kicked the Indians out of their own homelands when they weren't busy shooting them.
I donate money and my time to charities all of the time, and I'm an atheist. I do it because of how it makes me feel, to help out other people. Everyone has their reasons for what they do and I think it has more to do with who you are and how you were raised than it does with what your religion is.
I do it because I understand that it helps keep civilization running. You can't have people dropping dead in the street and drawing flies, you can't have starving people stealing food, you can't have homeless people clogging the stairwells in the subway station, and basically you need everybody to do their part to keep civilization running, not lying around starving or bleeding. Sure I get the same warm feeling from helping a fellow human being in need as anyone who's transcended his Stone Age instincts, but it's exacerbated by the knowledge that by helping that person I'm keeping civilization running smoothly.
Was your family religious?
My family was not religious and they also were considerably less charitable than I am. I'm like Cutsie and have found my way into a proper role in civilization that eluded my parents. But I can't fault them because somehow they raised a kid who grew up to be better than they were.
Most people in prison are religious in America.
Big deal. Unlike more enlightened Europe, most people in America classify themselves as religious. Why should the prison population be any different?
What are they religious about? Charity?
Since the Religious Redneck Retard Revival of the late 1970s swelled the ranks of American Christendom to its pre-Intellectual Revolution numbers, all those new converts are only in it for the forgiveness. At least this is what I hear from other Christians. I'm sure that's the draw in a population of felons, don't ya think?
