“Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it, selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to” Oscar Wilde
A new study published in Current Biology set out to compare altruism in different cultures but instad found that it was religion rather than culture that made religious kids more selfish than non religious children. It also found the same regarding adults in matters of morality. This all from an interesting read at Forbes, Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists.
[Take note that none of this matters to evangelicals for as you can see this contains the religious stop-words; “study”, “biology” and “scientists.”]
Of course we have always known this to be true regarding wars, capital punishment, corporeal punishment, intolerance, bigotry and racism, but deep in this article we find the rational for why that is.
Why are religious people less moral? One factor is a psychological phenomenon known as ‘moral licensing’: a person will justify doing something bad or immoral – like being racist – because they’ve already done something ‘good’, such as praying. “It’s an unconscious bias,” Decety explains. “They don’t even see that’s not compatible with what they’ve been learning in church.”
Which brings us to the beauty of religion, all the answers to life are right there in a book written by self mutilated monks in the Dark Ages who knew the stars were oil lanterns in the sky held up by angels, the Earth was flat, snakes talk, people live inside fishes and Jesus resurrected foul stinky dead bodies. Though in their defense, even they knew that the pyramids were not Joseph’s graineries.
No need to ever dream or wonder about space, time, the universe and your place in it, for it is all settled, it’s in the book.
And how did the interpretation order go again that these Dark Age Monks used?
Hebrew to Greek to Aramaic to Latin to English? Gee, hope they didn’t screw anything up.