Not a surprise.

Christians teach their children that their sins are forgiven so the children grow up doing whatever they feel like...say 5 hail Marys and their sins are erased.

Much as many have pointed out, the lack of the mindset of "We're going to heaven, and they're not." mentality is certainly present.

What I pick from this is a more important fact; that religiosity or lack thereof does not count as a qualifier of a persons altruism. Apparently this study, albeit a small sample size, leans towards the lack of religiosity leading to higher altruism which I find quite nifty.

I do find it sad that people have to put such value in a man-made book rather than their own instinct or (gasp) empathy.

The original study(research paper) is not titled that way.The scientists titled it "The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World"(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26549259/). Association doesn't mean causation. Anyway, these kind of social science studies are always spurious. I don't think children learn from a religious book directly, rather from religious parents.. then most likely religious families are less educated.. so I am not sure how directly it's correlated. Anyway, definitely there's some links. About 1200 is a very small sample to make such conclusion. If it were millions of kids out of billions of people, it would have been a different story. And know that in these modern days, these religious kids may grow out to be non religious. I don't know why they couldn't do studies on grown ups, rather they had to do studies on malleable children!! I understand that science and shallow journalism are not the same too. LoL

There's the added plus of not having your kids be all smug because they're going to heaven and everybody around them is going to hell.

I know mine are.

Well, when you're personal friends with the almighty, everyone else is second class.

If someone chooses kindness for its own sake rather than as a form of spiritual bribery to a deity they're more likely to value it and be kind more consistently without looking for a payoff.

This is true for my own kids