Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by brandon on December 11, 2011 at 10:33am

i totally agree with what you said. emotions have alot to do with it. i mean all respect to women but they are more vulnerable to the lies and will turn to there god for some type of help or guidance

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Permalink Reply by Edward Nygma on December 11, 2011 at 11:13am

Maybe part of it is that women, as more social creatures than men, value the social connections that come with being part of a religious community more than men do.

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Permalink Reply by trillianalice on December 11, 2011 at 11:45am

I am just going to speak for me.  I do not need an imaginary being for emotional support.  I do not need the church community for my well being.

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Permalink Reply by Amy L. Cook on December 11, 2011 at 12:30pm

I think that you are spot on, Sassan. Women are not only more emotional creatures, but we become more emotionally attached to things - even objects. I think that it is just harder for a woman to let go of their god because they have developed an emotional attachment to this being. I never had this problem, personally, because I have never been forced to consider God as a real entity. Fotunately, my parents chose to raise me without religion. But for women who were brought up religious I can imagine it is relly hard to let go of their 'Big Daddy in the Sky'.  lol...

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Permalink Reply by Albert Bakker on December 11, 2011 at 1:13pm

For good understanding it should probably be taken into account also that this gender imbalance goes not only for atheism, but also for skepticism. And on the other hand more and sometimes far more women believe in ghosts, reincarnation, miracles, all kinds of New Age garbage, astrology and so forth. This probably extends even further, for example in my country at least women are far more likely than men to believe in and practice all kinds of alt med. But people's education is a slightly better predictor than gender. Perhaps counter to what one would expect, those who received higher education are more likely to believe in and practice quackery than those with lower education.

Also counter to the tendency of women to be more prone to believe in things that are false is that American women were more likely to accept climate science than men and are more scientifically knowledgeable than men on this subject.

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Permalink Reply by Ed on December 12, 2011 at 12:55am

 "Perhaps counter to what one would expect, those who received higher education are more likely to believe in and practice quackery than those with lower education."

I assume you find this to be true in your specific country. It certainly doesn't make sense IMO.

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Permalink Reply by Albert Bakker on December 12, 2011 at 12:12pm

It is actually a pretty consistent picture. One study found people with (translated in US education system nomenclature) university, graduate and post-graduate level education and higher to be 2 to 3 times more likely to be using or have used some alt med cancer therapy than people with only high school or lower level college degrees. Comparisons between people in progressive stages of the disease showed this gap widened even further.

In another, besides confirming again that if you are a women and received higher education this makes you more susceptible to homeopathy, antroposophy, exorcism and other performances by paranormally gifted mediums, naturopathy, acupuncture, reiki and everything holistic with vitamins and unprocessed inedible crap under the Sun and what not, they also found that people under 55 were found to be more likely to believe in and use in quack medicine than people over 55.

I don't know if this is true for other countries, but while hoping to be wrong, I would suspect this to be the case. 

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Permalink Reply by Gabriela Menicucci on December 11, 2011 at 2:25pm

I have noticed that the more a woman believes in religion the more helpless she seems to perceive herself. I think us women living in a men's world feel vulnerable and having an imaginary relationship with Jesus makes us feel protected. Also for our female ancestors having a protector was a matter of life or death. Jesus is the ultimate protector (he seems to be more reliable than the average modern male :p)

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Permalink Reply by Unseen on December 11, 2011 at 4:37pm

You call it emotions, I call it hormones. Men and women taken in the aggregate are actually different. Go figure!

At the same time, one mustn't reason from the characteristics of a group to assume the same of an individual. If one imagines a scale that goes from irrational (emotional) on the left to rational (practical) on the right, the two sexes would each be represented by a bell curve. The female curve would peak somewhat to the left of the mail curve, but they wouldn't be bunched at the ends and wouldn't be THAT far apart, and there'd be plenty of females on the right side of their curve.

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Permalink Reply by Unseen on December 11, 2011 at 5:16pm

LOL... I really do know the difference between "male" and "mail," but my feeble fingers sometimes confuses homonyms.

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Permalink Reply by John Willis Reiser on December 11, 2011 at 5:05pm

The question is why are FEWER women atheist, not less.

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Permalink Reply by Unseen on December 11, 2011 at 5:11pm

Or "The question is why are fewer women atheistic" or "The question is why are there fewer women atheists" to be really picky about it.

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