Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Godless sex


In my humble opinion there's nothing more disconcerting or concentration killing than suspecting that you're being secretly spied on for punitive purposes. I guess that's the feeling a lot of religious believers have which underpins the results of this survey done in the USA which concludes that Atheists have much better sex lives that their religious brothers and sisters. Different religions were even scored for the "guilt level" of practitioners during sex, the results were interesting and unsurprisingly exactly what you'd expect if this were purely the product of impressionable human minds; the more fringe the beliefs the more the guilt. 

Here's a sampling of their findings,

"Strict religions such as Mormons ranked highest on the scale of sexual guilt. Their average score was 8.19 out of 10. They were followed closely behind by Jehovah's Witness, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, and Baptist.

"Catholics rated their levels of sexual guilt at 6.34 while Lutherans came slightly lower at 5.88.

"In contrast, atheists and agnostics ranked at 4.71 and 4.81 respectively."

Of course unlike religious people tending toward creationism, rationalists understand that sexual desire is a natural urge we get from our evolutionary heritage, it's a good thing without which we wouldn't exit, ergo, it's a human universal even though it manifests itself in many different ways. Understanding reality clearly has benefits which extend beyond mere understanding, once people realise that consensual pleasure between adults will not be punished by an omnipotent busy-body in the sky then guess what, they enjoy themselves more, probably have less stress and live happier, longer lives.

Obviously I can't prove that last comment, but could this be yet another sound reason to be an atheist?

2 comments:

Chairman Bill said...

I would suggest atheists would score even lower if they took out those who were having sex with someone other than their partner.

Steve Borthwick said...

CB, true! although the study found that even though religious people felt more guilty about having sex, the actual amount of sex being had didn't differ among the groups, i.e. the guilt didn't hold them back in the slightest - says it all really.