Education sways views on religion

[SecularMotion]

The old wisdom: The more educated you are, the less likely you will be religious. But a new study says education doesn't drive people away from God -- it gives them a more liberal attitude about who's going to heaven.

Each year of education ups the odds by 15 percent that people will say there's "truth in more than one religion," says University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Philip Schwadel in an article for the Review of Religious Research. Schwadel, an associate professor of sociology, looked at 1,800 U.S. adults' reported religious beliefs and practices and their education.

People change their perspective because, as people move through high school and college, they acquire an ever-wider range of friendships, including people with different beliefs than their own, Schwadel says. "People don't want to say their friends are going to hell," he says.

http://www.jconline.com/article/20110803/LIFE07/110803025/Education-sways-views-religion-?odyssey=mod

[queenjane]

1. I've noted that the faithful who are well educated

practice the very best tenets of religion: compassion, generosity, inclusiveness, kindness, progressiveness. The non-educated faithful tend to be racist, misogynist, xenophobic, cruel, and hateful. This is just MY observation; your opinion may vary. :-)

[struggle4progress]

5. I rather doubt education-level could predict compassion, generosity, or, kindness

Nor do I expect the less-educated to be more cruel and hateful

[laconicsax]

6. If it did, young children would be the most sadistic monsters of them all. n/t

[stopbush]

2. All that means is that educated people are better equipped to compartmentalize

the threats of damnation that religions use as a bludgeon to keep the sheeple in line.

Averring that, "People don't want to say their friends are going to hell," is an admission that people believe there is a hell to go to in the first place. One would hope that becoming more educated would disencumber people of such childish notions, but apparently, it doesn't.

One cannot overestimate the power that threats have over the way people think. You see it writ large in today's economic debacle, where the main thrust of the oligarch's strategy is to make people feel insecure at every level, to make them imagine that disaster is just around the corner. The Debil's gonna getcha! That makes people pliable and open to manipulation.

Think back on the Clinton years, when it was an employee's job market and companies were paying top dollar to secure talent in a market with 3% unemployment. Low unemployment is the last thing businessmen want, because it impacts their bottom line profits, with $ being diverted to salaries and out of dividends. Employees who can command good salaries are confident and less open to accepting BS coming from the power structure. Today's down economy kicks the shit out of employee confidence and helps to keep the workforce insecure at all levels.

Same goes with religion - teach the terror early in childhood and even adults who should know better will remain pliable when it comes to the concept of eternal suffering being a reality.

[Victor Waldman]

3. The old wisdom should be reversed: The less religious you are, the more likely you will be educated.

People who are highly and naturally intellectual are less likely to be religious. And people who are highly and naturally intellectual typically also have a natural passion for learning, therefore leading to a majority of non-religious people being well-educated. Education does not provoke non-religious intellects: Non-religious intellects provoke education.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

4. That Evangelical ideology of ''only those with beliefs XYZ wil be saved'' is exceedingly evil.

Any sane, enlightened person would reject that. No surprise for me.