Flutterby™! : Religion, morality & charity

Current Biology: The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World (PDF)

Here, we show that religiosity, as indexed by three different measures, is not associated with increased altruism in young children. Our findings robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households. Moreover, the negative relation be- tween religiousness and spirituality and altruism changes across age, with those children with longer experience of religion in the household exhibiting the greatest negative relations. ...

Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds