Tag Archives: Study

News

Congressional report: abstinence education is the best form of sex education

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Life News reports:

The House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee released a report on Friday entitled A Better Approach to Teenage Pregnancy Prevention: Sexual Risk Avoidance. The report makes it clear that abstinence education is the best approach when it comes to the different approaches for teaching sex education to teenagers.

The report examined the theory and the evidence behind both Sexual Risk Avoidance Abstinence Education and Sexual Risk Reduction, or so-called Comprehensive” Sex Education and concluded that abstinence education is the superior approach and one that deserves policy priority.

“America’s teens need guidance to protect them from the consequences of risky sexual behavior. Unfortunately, the current course of national policy on teenage pregnancy prevention is undermining the desired health outcome,” the report says. “Careful examination of research confirms that a value-neutral and risk reduction approach to sexual behavior is not consistent with teenage behavioral theory and not effective in impacting America’s high rates of teenage pregnancy and STIs.”

The report goes on to recommend that abstinence education: “is a better approach, because it is built on sound theory and empirical evidence.”

Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, applauded the report and its findings.

“We applaud the leadership of Rep. Pitts to correct current sex education policy by reestablishing a priority on the SRA abstinence education approach based on the evidence of effectiveness,” she said. The findings of this report reinforce the value of the Abstinence Education Reallocation Act, which will implement many of the policy changes suggested in the congressional report.”

The new report comes on the heels of a recently released NAEA, study that reached similar conclusions. But Huber says the Congressional Report is significant because it was released by the subcommittee which has jurisdiction over the nation’s sex education policies and provides a hopeful sign that Congress will work to correct the current federal sex education policy in the next session.

Other studies have shows that abstaining from sex before marriage, and even limiting the number of partners, helps marriages to be more stable and also more intimate.

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News

More social scientists stepping forward to defend Regnerus study

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Good news! See the part in bold below, too.

Excerpt:

An influential group of social scientists … have issued a public statement defending Mark Regnerus’s controversial study on same-sex parenting.

Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a paper in the July issue of Social Science Research that examined “how different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships?” His findings, based on his New Family Structures Study, indicated that young-adult children of parents who have had same-sex relationships are more likely to experience emotional and social problems.

His Slate article published in June drew more than 450 comments and set off a chorus of criticism.

In response, a group of 18 professors — including Michael Emerson, Christian Smith, Rodney Stark, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Bradley Wright — posted a defense on the website of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. They argue that rather then Regnerus’ study being “anti-gay,” “breathtakingly sloppy,” and “gets everything wrong” (as many media outlets have alleged), such public criticism is unwarranted for three reasons:

  1. Media outlets have not properly critiqued the “small, nonrepresentative samples” used by previous studies that showed equal or more positive outcomes for children of same-sex parents vs. heterosexual parents. “By contrast, Regnerus relies on a large, random, and representative sample of more than 200 children raised by parents who have had same-sex relationships, comparing them to a random sample of more than 2,000 children raised in heterosexual families, to reach his conclusions,” they wrote.
  2. Those critical of Regnerus surveying children from same-sex relationships with high levels of instability “fail to appreciate … that Regnerus chose his categories on the basis of young adults’ characterizations of their own families growing up, and the young adults whose parents had same-sex romantic relationships also happened to have high levels of instability in their families of origin.”
  3. Another new study (published this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family) — also based on a large, nationally representative, and random survey — comes to conclusions that parallel those of Regnerus’s study.

So that new study something to look forward to! I blogged about the criticisms of the Regnerus study and the other study that came out of the same time, in case anyone wants to double-check the details.

News

New study finds that belief in Hell is associated with reduced crime

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From Science Daily. (H/T Wes)

Excerpt:

Religions are thought to serve as bulwarks against unethical behaviors. However, when it comes to predicting criminal behavior, the specific religious beliefs one holds is the determining factor, says a University of Oregon psychologist.

The study, appearing in the Public Library of Science journalPLoS ONE, found that criminal activity is higher in societies where people’s religious beliefs contain a strong punitive component than in places where religious beliefs are more benevolent. A country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell, for example, is likely to have a much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal. The finding surfaced from a comprehensive analysis of 26 years of data involving 143,197 people in 67 countries.

“The key finding is that, controlling for each other, a nation’s rate of belief in hell predicts lower crime rates, but the nation’s rate of belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates, and these are strong effects,” said Azim F. Shariff, professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Morality Lab at the UO. “I think it’s an important clue about the differential effects of supernatural punishment and supernatural benevolence. The finding is consistent with controlled research we’ve done in the lab, but here shows a powerful ‘real world’ effect on something that really affects people — crime.”

Last year, in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Shariff reported that undergraduate students were more likely to cheat when they believe in a forgiving God than a punishing God.

Religious belief generally has been viewed as “a monolithic construct,” Shariff said. “Once you split religion into different constructs, you begin to see different relationships. In this study, we found two differences that go in opposite directions. If you look at overall religious belief, these separate directions are washed out and you don’t see anything. There’s no hint of a relationship.”

The new findings, he added, fit into a growing body of evidence that supernatural punishment had emerged as a very effective cultural innovation to get people to act more ethically with each other. In 2003, he said, Harvard University researchers Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary had found that gross domestic product was higher in developed countries when people believed in hell more than they did in heaven.

Here’s a quick re-cap on what counts as atheist morality, according to atheist scholars:

“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. “
– Cornell University evolutionist William Provine, in a debate with Phillip E. Johnson
Source: http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161ma

The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))

I’ve often argued on this blog that it is impossible for atheists to ground morality on an atheistic worldview. Atheism not only makes it hard for them to ground self-sacrificial actions rationally, but it even excuses them from having to make moral choices – since on their view they are only doing what they are programmed to do in response to certain instincts and sensory inputs. They don’t think there are any real objective moral values and objective moral duties, nor is there any free will, nor any afterlife. What kind of rational basis for self-sacrificial morality do those beliefs create? Morality isn’t doing what makes you feel good, or doing what most people like. Morality is doing hard things because they are right objectively. They can know right and wrong, and they can choose to do right and wrong, but none of that is rationally grounded by what they believe.

Ultimately, I think that people’s actions are bounded by what they think is rational. It’s easy to do things right when it feels good, but what about when it feels bad?