relationship

Online survey author alleges atheists have better sex lives

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Online survey author alleges atheists have better sex lives

Psychologist Darrel Ray, who was raised in a conservative Christian household, conducted an online survey to determine the impact of religion on sexual satisfaction.

Ray set out to confirm whether his own experience- that his sex life vastly improved when he ditched religion- bore out among others. Ray, who authored the book The God Virus: How God Infects Our Lives and Culture, sought out 14,500 people who had once been religious or raised in a religious environment before becoming atheist or agnostic. What Ray discovered is that guilt seems to heavily influence sexual satisfaction in many specific subsets of Christianity.

The survey did not adhere to social science study guidelines, but Ray reported the results as follows:

Those who had been raised Mormon with their strict views about sex, showed the highest rating among those who had sexual guilt with an average score of 8.19 out of 10. Others with similar responses were Jehovah’s Witness, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist and Baptist.

Catholics, on the other hand, rated their guilt at 6.34 and Lutherans came in at 5.88. Atheists and agnostics were the lowest in guilt at 4.71 and 4.81.

University of Texas at Austin associate professor Mark Regnerus dismissed the survey as biased and said Ray’s methods were “unscientific,” adding:

“It appears that it was a ‘fill it out if you want to’ kind of survey that is not random, not nationally representative, and relies entirely on self-selection,” he said. “In other words, they have data from people who felt like filling out a survey on atheism and sex. As a result, I am not surprised at their findings.”

Regnerus said the results were based on “hearsay or guesswork,” and opined:

“I don’t fault the author for running the survey he did, but it does display research methods which do not meet the standards of most published social science.”

Indeed, the results would have been a bit more interesting even just stacked against responses from religious folk who consider themselves sexually satisfied. Do you agree with Ray’s findings? Does religion or lack thereof significantly affect your view on sex?

“Relationship With God”

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I just heard someone use the oft-used phrase “my relationship with God”, and had to stop the conversation right there.

In what sort of twisted world do we live in, where people can say something like that and expect to be taken seriously? You very literally have to be delusional to believe you can have a relationship with a god.

First off, if you believe you can hear the voice of god, you should seriously get your head checked. It bothers me to no end when people passively accept when people claim god spoke to them instead of telling them “no, that you was you talking to yourself”, or, “you’re crazy”. This complacency is entirely harmful, not just to the person making the claim, but also those around him/her. Letting people believe anything they want to is entirely harmful, in the same way letting a child believe he can fly if he jumps off the roof of a building.

Secondly, what sort of twisted definition of the word relationship do you have to have, in order to feel you can have a relationship with a being that never gives even the slightest response? When was the last time that god actually did anything for you? Has he ever cut the lawn when you asked? Give you a backrub when you feel tired? What about doing the dishes? Obviously not only an able bodied person can do such things, but what if anything has god EVER done in your “relationship”? I often get anecdotes of some obscure occurrence that was then construed as being an act of god, which can always be more accurately explained in a rational way.

This leads to believe that dogmatic individuals have no real concept of a relationship, which is quite an irony given that it is the religious crazies that feel the need to go on and on about our relationships and love all the time. Then again, they see no irony that a celibate old man should be teaching them of things like love. Why? Because of the intensely loving relationship the priest has with god. Hahaha.

So, what have I derived from all this? Religious folk are far more in love with ideas and dreams than they are with reality. They would much rather exist in a dream-like state than spend their life awake and self-aware. Don’t believe me? Why do all religions spend so much time fixated on the wonders of the after-life than on pre-after-life?

You only get one life, don’t spend it day dreaming of what’s next.