Spiritual women are more promiscuous than are non-spiritual women. The study differentiated between “spiritual” and “religious” and though the article focuses on spirituality, the pecking order seems to be spiritual over non-spiritual, irreligious over religious. Their theory:
“Believing one is intimately tied to other human beings and that interconnectedness and harmony are indispensible may lead one to believe sexual intimacy possesses a divine or transcendent quality in itself,” Burris writes. “In fact, ascribing sacred qualities to sex has been positively associated with positive affective reactions to sex, frequency of sex, and number of sexual partners among university students.”
Sounds blissful.
I have an alternative theory.
Being an atheist is undemanding but also unpopular and for a lot of people unfulfilling. Being a member of an organized religious provides you with a packaged set of beliefs but comes with a bunch of rules you have to follow. Call yourself “spiritual” and not “religious” and you can do whatever the heck you want with less in the way of social consequences and you can find meaning in whatever the heck you want to find meaning in. So if it feels good you can make it not about feeling good but about connectedness and all that jazz. The rules are typically more generous when you make them up as you go along. You get gratification from all ends.
That these people would correlate highly with people that engage in promiscuous, unprotected sex is hardly a surprise.
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8 Responses to Gettin’ It On With Spirit
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Yarp. It’s all well and good to say that *in theory* atheists could construct an idea of morality that is just as moral, in a worldly sense, as religious strictures. However in practice people are selfish and lazy, and given a choice they will take the easiest way out, constructing a “morality” that just happens to allow everything they like doing, and censures folks they don’t like.
This does not mean that certain individual atheists can’t be fine upstanding people, of course. But as a rule for society, derive-your-own-morality is a formula for turpitude.
I have an even simpler theory: “Spiritual but not religious” women are dumber than atheists, and dumber people have more sex.
No one here wants to mention self-selection bias? People aren’t assigned to religious, spiritual, and atheist categories at random. Doesn’t it make sense that we might pick our beliefs to be consistent with our behavior?
Errr, I thought my (“alternate”) theory was self-selection. People selecting the religious/spiritual category most convenient to them.
PeterW: Yup! With no God, plenty of people are just going to lie, cheat, and steal. Of course the Yuppie crowd has the future-time orientation and self-discipline to simply engage in kinky sex more often without having lots of surplus babies, but the proles are going to screw it up and get stuck with excess kids they can’t care for.
The nice thing about being a conservative is that you have no problem being an elitist. 😉 I think I could get to like this side of the aisle…
With no God, plenty of people are just going to lie, cheat, and steal.
With god it’s no different. There is not any significant difference between the crime rate of atheists and the crime rate of theists. Religiosity changes nothing but to which charities you give and what words are read over you.
If god is real then he’s irrelevant.
Atheists have an advantage of being on average more educated and smarter than non-atheists. It’s possible that if you look at those that are less educated and less intelligent (the kinds you worry about with regard to crime) that you will see a significant difference.
I don’t worry about whether my peers believe in God or not. I do hope that those down the chain do, though, whether a god actually exists or not. I am inclined to believe it ultimately helps.