Why Do More Women Than Men Still Believe in Woo-Woo?
DharmaTroll
In other words, Atheism is from Mars, Wicca is from Venus."
http://www.doublex.com/section/life/why-do-more-women-men-still-believe-god
Why Do More Women Than Men Still Believe in God -- Especially
considering how God treats them?
By Lauren Sandler
Last week, a new study confirmed something essential about women,
something that refuses to budge, even though many say it’s long past
time. Professors at Trinity College in Connecticut analyzed the
numbers of Americans unaffiliated to any religion. While the number of
male nonbelievers was rocketing, the overall totals were slowed by
women hitching themselves to the anchor of faith: “Gender difference
is a brake on the growth of the No Religion population,” says the
study, which found that 19 percent of men were no longer denizens of a
religious America, while only 12 percent of women live outside the
faithful fold. In the past, one could say that women tended the
hearth, and men participated in the marketplace. But today?
These statistics are consistent with a recent Pew Forum summary of
religion in America. In fact, a researcher at Pew told me that studies
going back as far as he can remember have shown this discrepancy, and
reaching back into history, even prehistory, we find the same story.
And yet, major religions—put down your crystals and pocket those
pentagrams, ladies—have always favored men. Not a single major faith
is led by members of its female flock, and the more deeply adherent a
religious group becomes, the less freedom it offers its women, not to
mention power. It's hard not to compare women sticking with faith to
wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the
institution that they'll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to
maintain their own status quo.
Researchers have offered many theories about why women are religious
in greater numbers than men. Most are inconclusive; all are
fascinating. Some investigators locate the engine of belief in our
very brain chemistry, and find the female brain far more apt to sense
the divine. Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Michael Persinger, the
reigning cleric of the neurology of belief, has asserted that the
“experience” of God, or feeling the presence of the divine, is
literally built into the brain, specifically in the limbic system or
the temporal lobe. When Persinger applied magnetic fields over the
temporal lobe to mimic the reaction he found in electromagnetic
studies, the gender difference was “quite impressive”—that women
sensed the presence of a “sentient being” in greater numbers than men.
“Belief,” Persinger told me, “relates more to how the person relates,
interprets, and reconstructs the experience.” In other words, even
when men and women had the same response in the brain, women were more
apt to attribute it to something divine, “out of body.” Other
scientists have found these limbic tendencies particularly pronounced
in adolescent girls, concurrent with the final stages of brain
development. As Barry Kosmin, a coauthor of the new Trinity College
study says, “That's why when anybody sees the Virgin Mary, it's a
couple of young girls on a mountainside in Southern Europe.” (Nota
bene: This week, Sam Harris—who gained fame by authoring The End of
Faith but is by training a neuroscientist—released his new findings on
the neural correlates of belief. He told me in this case he found no
difference between the workings of the female and male brain.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007272
)
Some researchers hypothesize that women are hardwired to believe
because of evolutionary imperatives. Belief in God—or the Mount
Olympus ensemble cast, or a phalanx of wood spirits, and so on—has
long been connected with tribal ritual, and formed the center of
communities. Women relied on these communities for the survival of
their children, while men were off spearing buffalo, pillaging
neighboring settlements—or whatever the caveman business trip
furnished. The relationship between belonging and belief is an ancient
one. It may have resulted in the development of certain alleles
connected to a sense of God, or at least a commitment to religion.
Or, instead of changing our very biology, it may have simply yielded a
deeply ingrained psychology. One of the more interesting essays I
found on this topic was published, interestingly enough, on the indie-
porn site Suicide Girls, occasioned by the 200th anniversary of
Darwin's birth— likely the only time that site will be featured on
Richard Dawkins' homepage. Elisabeth Cornwell, an evolutionary
psychologist at the University of Colorado, wrote about how disbelief
has always represented rebellion and nonconformity, which meant
exclusion from the group—in other words, social suicide for a girl.
Furthermore, as Cornwell says, “religion creates the illusion of
kinship, and kinship is crucial to a woman's reproductive success.”
About a decade ago, Michael Shermer, the author of How We Believe and
a columnist at Scientific American, conducted a study in which he
found that women explain their belief in “emotional” terms (“emotional
comfort, a desire for meaning and purpose in life”), while men express
“rational” bases for belief (citing intelligent design and the notion
that “without God there is no basis for morality, existence of evil,
pain, and suffering”). He says that he chalks up the greater number of
male nonbelievers to the fact that “it's a guy thing to obsess about
the empirical nature of the world.” In other words, atheism is from
Mars, Wicca is from Venus. In any case, he sees religiosity as
synonymous with conventionality, which women have long been under the
yoke to preserve. Women's association of conformity with survival
traverses the disciplines when researchers agonize about our greater
piety.
Whatever the explanation, social scientists are baffled by women
sticking to faith in such great numbers. It used to be understood that
men working in the marketplace were exposed to ideas and alternatives
that homebound women would never know, and thus women hewed to the
church (convention), while men rejected it. This is partially how we
understand the far greater numbers of nonreligious women in Europe:
When things changed, they changed with it. Here, religion has become
more feminized—at least in many circles—or, as Barry Kosmin says,
“church is like going to the Oprah Winfrey Show.” One reason religion
caters to women is its need to control their behavior “around sex,
procreation, that kind of stuff,” adds Kosmin. Still, half a century
since the world-inverting advent of the Pill, here we still are.
Furthermore, says his coauthor Ariela Keysar, women are the ones who
usually inculcate their own daughters in religion, despite what little
power it offers them. “It's this chain of assigning roles—men don't
have it in the same way,” she says.
Certainly, not all strands of religion—even within the Big Three of
monotheism—overtly preach wifely submission, or wrap us in hijabs, or
make us stand in the back of the temple, if we get to go at all. But,
as Ophelia Benson, author of Does God Hate Women? pointed out to me,
“People tend to exaggerate how much liberal religion there is.”
Certainly it’s the illiberal pews that are increasingly packed with
new followers. She writes,“Religion doesn't originate ideas about
female subordination and male authority, but it does justify them.”
And yet, we keep showing up for more.
If this were a different type of personal relationship we were talking
about, instead of the one most women say they feel with God, maybe
we'd be weeping about it on Oprah's actual couch, debating whether we
are hardwired for this, whether we perpetuate it, why men would never
stand for it. But instead, though women's greater belief is an age-old
truism, and though we show no indication that we will evolve our own
psychology, should our brain chemistry permit it, we don't talk about
it at all.
zenworm
> “It's a guy thing to obsess about the empirical nature of the world.
> In other words, Atheism is from Mars, Wicca is from Venus."
>
excellent!
^worm
Charles E Hardwidge
news:70f90a2f-6a82-4729...@37g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
> �It's a guy thing to obsess about the empirical nature of the world.
> In other words, Atheism is from Mars, Wicca is from Venus."
>
> http://www.doublex.com/section/life/why-do-more-women-men-still-believe-god
>
> Why Do More Women Than Men Still Believe in God -- Especially
> considering how God treats them?
> By Lauren Sandler
You get the same crap in politics. Apparently, the Tories have a higher
percentage of women voting for them than Labour. I put it down to the
illusion of undemanding certainty and sense they're in a club. Of course,
it's irrational and they'll ditch you when the going gets tough but it puts
bumbs on seats and creates the illusion of popularity.
The story changes when you examine delivery and where their loyalties lie
which is why the right wing female vote is softening and being targeted by
Labour. This has little to do directly with "God" or even governance but
does have real world impact down the road. Perhaps, Labour haven't been
perfect but I'd hate to be the one to pay the bill for a Tory victory.
--
Charles E Hardwidge