Posted August 08, 2017 15:14:21

Who would you trust more, a person who says they're religious or someone who identifies as atheist?

The answer it appears, according a study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is that even though we live in an age of terrorism and religious conflict, people are almost twice as likely to believe atheists are responsible for "extreme moral violations".

Researchers surveyed more than 3,000 people in 13 countries across five continents, covering both secular and highly religious parts of the world.

Which means even fellow atheists tended to believe that non-believers were more likely to commit immoral acts.

"We wanted to see whether people are implicitly equating religiosity, or being a believer in God, with moral behaviour," Dr Ilan Dar-Nimrod, from the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, said.

The researchers asked what people thought about a person who displayed "gross immoral behaviours" including mutilating animals and murdering and mutilating homeless people.

"Would they consider that person more likely to be an atheist or a person who doesn't believe in God or a religious believer?" Dr Dar-Nimrod explained.

In the survey the participants were asked whether the perpetrator was a teacher, or whether they were a teacher who is an atheist thus avoiding asking directly whether they were a believer or not.

"We were trying to just look at how likely it would be for a person to actually endorse some sort of ... grossly immoral behaviour, with a person that is actually a believer or a non-believer," he said.

The end results come as a surprise to some atheists, with social commentator Jane Caro saying they flew "in the face of history".

She said it was hard to comprehend how religion continued to be so closely attached to morality.

"It is interesting that people still associate morality with the idea of punishment and reward," Ms Caro said.

Ms Caro said it struck her as "fairly infantile" that people behaved well purely out of fear of going to hell and the hope they would get into heaven.

"The atheist knows there's no external end-of-life reward or punishment for doing the right or the wrong thing.

"They do the right thing because it's the right thing to do and that actually is a more mature morality."

However the results did not suggest that atheists actually committed evil acts any more than believers.

In fact, it pointed to what it called a "prejudice" against people who said there was no God.

And according to social researcher Hugh MacKay who describes himself as a Christian Agnostic that prejudice is growing.

"The prejudice against atheists is probably hardening as they become, or [are] perceived courtesy of various prominent figures more hard-spoken and more hard-line, and specifically, more anti-religion," he said.

"As opposed to just being an atheist, which is saying 'I don't believe in God' that's not a ground for attacking religion or attacking anything.

"But because they have become more aggressive, inevitably they are attracting the sort of prejudice that people who have religious beliefs, or who try to encourage others who adopt their religious beliefs, attract."

He said the finding that atheists themselves tended to agree with the hypothesis was "slightly puzzling".

"But I guess it's to do with the fact that there are hard-line atheists, and quieter, softer atheists," he said.

"The quieter softer ones who just want to say 'Look it's not a big deal for me, I'm just an atheist, move on, what's for lunch', compared with the hard-line atheists who are really wanting to be militant about it."

Michael Boyd, vice president of the Atheists Foundation of Australia, said it revealed a misapprehension about what atheism itself really is.

"It's really just a profession of a non-belief in gods or spirits," he said.

"Once that issue is out of the way, then that's the end of atheism as far as a person is concerned.

"The rest of their life is just like anyone else's, and probably similar to the vast majority of people who would call themselves religious, but really don't follow their faith at all."

Topics: religion-and-beliefs, community-and-society, law-crime-and-justice, australia

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Spirituality is still seen as a safeguard against extreme immoral acts, study shows - ABC Online