[Dion]

Get this: Religious and nonreligious people are equally prone to immoral acts

So finds a new study by Saint Peter's University, which I read about in Science magazine.

Daniel Wisneski and Wilhelm Hofmann, the study's lead authors, recruited 1,252 adults between ages 18 and 68 using Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter and other outlets. Participants downloaded an app to their smartphones that allowed researchers to text them five times a day. The participants then reported any moral or immoral acts — things they did themselves, witnessed or heard about — and rated how intensely they felt about those acts on a scale of 0 to 5.

Participants filed 13,240 reports, describing everything from arranging adulterous encounters (immoral) to giving a homeless man a sandwich (moral). Researchers spent weeks reviewing the comments and identified six moral principles: care for others, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Researchers also found that the participants' judgment reflected two other moral behaviors: honesty and self-discipline.

“They found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to report acts involving sanctity and respect for authority, and liberals were more likely than conservatives to talk about fairness,” according to Science.

But their finding on religion — that people who identified themselves as religious were just as moral or immoral as nonreligious people — most grabbed my attention

http://triblive.com/opinion/tompurce...#axzz3Ejt7PbhN