Comments on: Americans Who Don’t Identify with a Religion No Longer a Fringe Group

By: Monado

Monado — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:28:02 +0000

One author, I think Betty Freidan, suggested that women are more superstitious because the outcome of their lives is greatly influenced by whom they marry, and that is largely a crapshoot, I mean influenced by luck. As a hypothesis, it sounds plausible. A woman generally adopts her husbands friends and hobbies and her life is greatly influenced by his success or lack thereof.

In Freidan’s time, it was even more the case. I was taken aback to find out, after I married, that if my husband decided to move to the middle of nowhere and I declined to accompany him, legally I would be abandoning him and not vice versa. The law has since been changed to require some negotiation between spouses as to where their domicile shall be.

By: Jared

Jared — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:19:01 +0000

Interesting for you to mention that, Stacy; the book I am currently reading (very slowly, but reading) deals with the Sullk’ata of Bolivia and it seems the women play the central role in religious rituals. Along with this, I too have noticed the pattern of men (mostly among the Catholic families I know, but also from a few Episcopal/Catholic Lite and Methodist families) only tentatively attending religious ceremonies as an obligation rather than a desire to attend. I’m not sure if this is as pervasive as these anecdotes suggest, but it is interesting. If this is truly the case, then it is even more interesting that most Christian and Islamic denominations and exclude women from leadership roles. So, not quite QED, but *NAD. We may have something interesting to look into.
*Need additional data.

By: Autsin

Autsin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:14:18 +0000

Part of the basis of “belief” seems to be the tendancy to project personal characteristics on the environment in an effort to determine “root cause”. The logic of an ancient believer might be, “Gee, we make a lot of noise and throw things around when we get angry. A volcano makes a lot of noise and throws things around. The volcano must be angry.”

Such rationale (if actual) could be understood as a misdirected form of empathy.

If one assumes (as is commonly assumed; whether it’s justifed or not I don’t know) that women, on average, have more empathy than men, it would therefore be simple to conclude that if 1) “belief” is a form of empathic response and 2) women have more empathy than men then *) women would therefore be more inclined to belief than men.

Again, those are two assumptions – there may be evidence to support the assumptions, and there may not. It’s a possible chain of logic, and might make a decent starting point for analysis.

By: Stacy

Stacy — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:15:02 +0000

I didn’t chime in on the earlier thread – so here goes. I know that some of you are going to think I’m nuts. Please just know that I love you all. 🙂

I agree entirely with this survey! (There I said it – whew!)

I’ve always thought that men that were really religious were weak minded. Not strong.
I do not necessarily think that male “believers” are weak – just the religious.

In my view, men that went to church regularly were doing so for financial (networking) reasons or because their wives made them.

I remember thinking this way since I was very young. (Dad’s an atheist – Mom’s a believer) They must have had some type of arrangement, because my brothers and I were not asked to go to church after we reached a certain age – of course we could go if we wanted to.

Forgive me, I’m just throwing this out there … I’m a girl and I have always been very good at math. I know there have been some studies suggesting that men are better at math than women. I wonder if the same ratio of male to female non-believers would be similar to the ratio of male to female SAT scores (or something like that) for math? In other words… Does one’s capacity for logic have anything to do with these results?