The Religious And Immoral Acts

If that’s something you’ve been asking welcome to the club. I’ve done a little research on the subject in order to find an answer to the question of how devout believers can sometime behave so intolerantly toward others. There is a wealth of information in articles, books, and research studies. What became very clear is that the question can’t be answered to everyone’s satisfaction, but I found some studies that at least shed a little light on the matter.

The Cheating Game

For example, there have been many studies that use a technique wherein a group of volunteers are asked to play games that tempt one segment of a group to cheat at the game. Researchers found that religious believers act more morally than nonreligious people in such games but only when they are interacting with members of their own religious community or among people who hold similar beliefs.

In more recent such studies researchers have gone a step further and used technology to do the testing. In a 2014 study, scientists used a smartphone app to track what they termed the “sins” and “good deeds” of more than 1200 volunteers. They found that religious people and non-religious people are equally likely to commit “immoral” acts. How did the researchers deduce this? Using various social networks they had the volunteers, age 18 to 68, download an app with the promise that they could win an iPod Touch in a lottery. The app, they were told, allowed the researchers to ‘buzz’ them with a text message five times a day. When the volunteers opened the resultant text messages they were asked to report if they’d witnessed, heard about, or performed any moral or immoral acts within the past hour. The researchers got more than 13,000 messages as a result in which the volunteers confessed to a number of offenses. Some of the admissions were quite startling, including arranging for an adulterous affair. But, there were also plenty of ‘good deeds’ reported as well.

But when the results were analyzed, the researchers found that the volunteers who identified themselves as religious or non-religious were both equally likely to perform moral or immoral acts irrespective of their stated beliefs or lack thereof.

While a number of variables make the study outcomes less than 100 percent perfect or applicable in all situations it does give some insight into how people act whether they espouse strong religious or belief convictions or not.