“Far from being dysfunctional, nihilistic and rudderless without the security and rectitude of religion,” declares Zuckerman, “secular households provide a sound and solid foundation for children, according to Vern Bengston, a USC professor of gerontology and sociology.” Bengston directs the Longitudinal Study of Generations, America’s largest study of families and their religious affiliations. After seeing an increase in nonreligious households, Bengston included secularism in the study in 2013.“Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious’ parents in our study,” Bengston told Zuckerman in an interview. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.”
“For secular people, morality is predicated on one simple principle: empathetic reciprocity, widely known as the Golden Rule. Treating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs.”
And check this out: Atheists “were almost absent from our prison population as of the late 1990s,” accounting for less than half of one percent of inmates, according to reports by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “This echoes what the criminology field has documented for more than a century,” Zuckerman writes, “the unaffiliated and the nonreligious engage in far fewer crimes.”
Furthermore, a troubling BBC article last year discovered that religious children were less likely than their nonreligious peers to discern fiction from reality, according to a Boston University research. Children were presented with realistic, religious, and magical stories and asked whether they believed the stories were true or not. According to researchers, “[c]hildren with a religious upbringing tended to view the protagonists in religious stories as real, whereas children from non-religious households saw them as fictional.” And why is this problematic? Because it makes it difficult for a child to distinguish between truth and fiction, as well as spirituality and fantasy.
“For secular people, morality is predicated on one simple principle: empathetic reciprocity, widely known as the Golden Rule. Treating other people as you would like to be treated,” writes Zuckerman. “It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs.”
The Los Angeles Times has published Zuckerman’s full report. With all of this in mind, go forth and raise your godless hellfire demon children, y’all.
According to a recent Los Angeles Times piece, the stubborn God-fearing mother is no longer the paradigm of excellent parenting. According to many publications, research suggests that a secular upbringing may be healthier for children. According to a 2010 Duke University study, children reared in this manner are less prone to racism and peer pressure, and are “less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.” But the list of perks does not end there.
According to Phil Zuckerman of the Times, citing Pew Research, there has been a recent increase in the number of American households who identify as “Nones” – their religious affiliation is “nothing in particular.” According to Zuckerman, modern nonreligious adults make up 23% of Americans. As early as the 1950s, the percentage was only 4%. With godlessness on the rise, experts have begun to examine the benefits of nonreligious child upbringing more closely.
