YMix wrote:Does growing up religious cut the urge to share?
Children of religious parents may not be as altruistic as their parents think, according to new research from six countries around the world.
A team of developmental psychologists examined the perceptions and behavior of children in six countries. The study assessed the children’s tendency to share—a measure of their altruism—and their inclination to judge and punish others for bad behavior.
As reported in Current Biology, children from religious families were less likely to share with others than were children from non-religious families. A religious upbringing also was associated with more punitive tendencies in response to anti-social behavior.
Many families believe religion plays an essential role in childhood moral development. The study’s results were at odds with the perceptions of religious parents, who were more likely than non-religious parents to report that their children had a high degree of empathy and sensitivity to the plight of others.
“Our findings contradict the common-sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind toward others,”says study leader Jean Decety, professor in psychology and psychiatry and director of the University of Chicago Child NeuroSuite.
“In our study, kids from atheist and non-religious families were, in fact, more generous.”
The study included 1,170 children between ages 5 and 12, from Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States.
Interesting, numerous studies have failed to detect a relation between religiosity and actual ethical behavior.
Belief is a forcible, firm, steady conception of an object. The relation to that object, human or otherwise, becomes mediated by that concept. Empathy is an immediate sympathetic response to the conditions of others. Ethics is actuated through an empathetically mediated, sympathetic, altruistic impulse to a presenting situation.
Beliefs mediate through concepts not through empathy, and while they can assist in articulating certain principles of good behavior, they do not necessarily inspire empathy in real situations when the genuine ethical tests present themselves. They can often be a barrier to empathy since the relation to the other is to the other as only concept and not as another, authentic being.
Of course, belief has nothing to do with faith, although that is a ubiquitous misunderstanding. Christian faith is about empathetic participation in the Cross which brings one into intimate relation with the suffering of others through the Christ.