Thirith on 27/1/2012 at 19:20

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I think it's sentences such as this one that has made this discussion so frustrating to follow. Statistics doesn't work like that. Tendencies don't work like that. Correlation doesn't work like that. No one is saying that education automatically, unfailingly, always makes you irreligious. Tendencies are never true for 100% of all cases.

What is being discussed is whether (university) education will make one less likely to be inclined toward religion, which is independent from the culture of the universities in question. Essentially your post isn't saying anything very different from earlier posts by people saying, "This is bullshit - a good friend of mine has a PhD and he's more religious than the pope!"

june gloom on 27/1/2012 at 21:18

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Well, you have two options. You could go with "meeting once a month to eat pizza and have frank, but polite, discussions on religion, skepticism, and their opposing/complementary roles in society" or the far more popular "get into big arguments about Doctor Who while everyone is miserable and the pizza gets cold and then someone large and bearded and wearing a black t-shirt with a skull on it flips the table and LEAVES FOREVER until next week."

... to be fair, atheists groups tend to focus on activism, and there isn't really a lot to be an activist about. Other than people being mean on the internet, atheists have the same rights as anyone else, it's not like the government tells them they can't marry or they have to sit in the back of the bus. And most of the time when they protest something religious they come off as self-righteous douchebags. (Much like most religious people do when they protest anything...)

june gloom on 27/1/2012 at 21:27

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people who do THAT do exist though

they're called hipsters

Bakerman on 27/1/2012 at 22:37

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I think kitties was trying to get at the subtlety in the situation. It's well and good to conclude that education may tend to make you less religious (or, educated people may tend to be less religious, I should say), and I think we're mostly agreed on this, whether from statistics or personal experience... but then it's interesting to take a more detailed look.

Epos Nix on 28/1/2012 at 01:14

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The capacity for accepting religion or not is directly tied to how we choose (or perhaps: are forced by our biological makeup) to insert ourselves and adapt to our personal world.

There will be those who feel exterior pressure to conform to the expected norms of society. In some cases not adapting can mean penalty of death, so it's a good idea.

There will be those who don't have the logical capacity to reason out their own existence, let alone the existence of everything. They will grasp on to the set of values that most closely matches their own.

There will be those whose intellects and intuitions can so easily probe the 'truths' set forth by religion that they quickly tire themselves by what they consider the illogical fallacy of the idea that they quickly give up on it.

And there will be those who just accept what they are told because it is status-quo and who are they to go against it? Also, some people have the intuition to perceive that something is 'there' but not the logical function to realize what 'it' is.


I find it interesting how personality type and religious ideals typically go hand-in-hand.

(http://player2000gi.host-ed.net/religion_and_type.htm)