Today I want to present a little research on religiousness and fecundity that I performed on a free dating website that collects a lot of data about the degree of religiousness and the desire to have children. Unfortunately the search engine provided by the website does not allow queries about how faithful a person and whether he or she likes children, so I had to limit my queries on type of faith and children already present or not.
Figure 1. The frequency of having at least one child when registered with the dating website.
The result (Fig. 1) is not surprising. It shows what we already know. Religious people are more likely to already have children even when registered with this dating website for search of a new partner. The selection bias that only those people become member of this website that are not in a relationship might explain why Hindus and Jews have only few children when advertising on this website. Probably, in these religions, if children are present or planned, strong family bounds are demanded. An other explanation might be the under-representation of Hindus in America. The next figure (Fig. 2) shows the population density. Given these data, I have to admit that only reliable conclusions about religiousness and the probability to have children can be made for Agnostics, Atheists, Catholics, Christians, and Jews.
Figure 2. The cumulative popolation density of members in selected East Cost and West Cost areas.
Still, the difference between atheistic and religious faiths is striking. What amazes me is Buddhism. I don’t know enough about this faith but I always find its position somewhere between Atheism and Christianity.
Figure 3. The frequency by which religious and non religous members declared that they don't want children.
Next I did something more experimental. I collected data by google search of the dating website. That approach allowed me to quantify the degree of religiousness, and also I was able to discriminate between those member who do not want children and those who like them. The result, although consistent with the former data, came as a surprise to me. I expected that at the outset Atheists and Religious people were similar, but the difference was even more striking (Fig. 3). By contrast to what I said in my previous post this rather supports the assumption that differences are genetically determined or imprinted during childhood. Well, though differences growing with age and family responsibility would more support my assertion of a social (cultural) determination, the data, on the other hand, does not contradict these ideas. People registered with this website are mature socially active individuals, so cultural factors have already affected them substantially.
This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.
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