Bad Samaritans. Religious People Less Compassionate Than Atheists

Hate thy neighbour!
False witnessing for a god who allegedly forbade false witnessing!

Atheists More Motivated by Compassion than the Faithful | Live Science

Despite purporting to believe in a god who told people to do unto others what they would want others to do unto them, and despite Jesus allegedly making up a tale about a 'good' Samaritan to show you don't need to be Christian to be good, you just need empathy, and that anyone who needs your help is 'thy neighbour' whom you should love, religious people tend to be less caring and compassionate than Atheists, according to recent research. Their work is to be published in the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science on 12 July and builds on the same team's findings published last April in the same journal

In that paper, a research team reported finding that compassion is greater amongst less religious people, who so tend to be more generous. The team tested the hypothesis that, with fewer religious expectations of prosociality, less religious individuals’ levels of compassion will play a larger role in their prosocial tendencies. They found, as the results of three separate studies that:

1. Compassion was more critical to the generosity of less religious people.
2. Increased generosity among less religious individuals but not among more religious individuals
3. Feelings of compassion predicted increased generosity across a variety of economic tasks for less religious individuals but not among more religious individuals.

Although that paper is firewalled, the experiments were described in LiveScience:

• In the first study, Saslow and her colleagues analyzed data from a national survey of more than 1,300 American adults taken in 2004. They found that compassionate attitudes were linked with how many generous behaviors a person was likely to report. But this link was strongest in people who were atheists or only slightly religious, compared with people who were more strongly religious.
• In a second experiment, 101 adults were shown either a neutral video or an emotional video about children in poverty. They were then given 10 fake dollars and told they could give as much as they liked to a stranger. Those who were less religious gave more when they saw the emotional video first.
  
  "The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity," Willer said. "But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants."
• Finally, a sample of more than 200 college students reported their current level of compassion and then played economic games in which they were given money to share or withhold from a stranger. Those who were the least religious but most momentarily compassionate shared the most.

Experiments such as this give the lie to the frequent claims of religious frauds that, because Atheist allegedly have no moral compass or 'objective' moral values, they are incapable of acting morally.

In fact, those claims are only ever made by religious fundamentalists whose 'objective' morality seems not to tell them that bearing false witness such as this is wrong because it encourages hate towards those who tend to be the most compassionate and so do the most good in society, often to mitigate some of the harm done by religions.

False witnessing against Atheists by religious frauds is probably a terror management strategy designed to cope with their fear that Atheists are right, and they are wasting their life hoping for something better later. Tweet

Atheists, on the other hand, are living for life, not waiting for death, so get on with creating a better world for the one life we have.

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