Atheists Are Less Open-Minded Than Religious People, Study Claims

Researchers at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium suggest religious believers ‘seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives’

Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to researchers at a Catholic university.

A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are are actually less tolerant to differing opinions and ideas.

Religious believers “seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives”, according to psychology researchers at the private Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium’s largest French-speaking university.

Filip Uzarevic, who co-wrote the paper, said his message was that “closed-mindedness is not necessarily found only among the religious”. told Psypost:

“In our study, the relationship between religion and closed-

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A Fascinating Map of The World’s Most and Least Racially Tolerant Countries

My Note: Woow! If this is the harvested fruit of academic excellence, the world is braced for more immense confusion and trouble. By qualifying Somalia artificially as less homogeneous than European countries they attempt to prove, Homogeneity = Prosperity. Mind you, every European country is heterogeneous. Next, they speak of Pakistan as more tolerant than India or Germany. Does this make sense at all?! Even, racially more divided South Africa is bluer than, probably, the most tolerant state in history, Ethiopia. Yes! The world’s 20 most diverse countries are all African, but in their diversity lies their richness. All these diverse countries in Africa are more tolerant, and have more stability and peace than such relatively homogeneous and intolerant nations like Somalia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.

The world knows which populations of the planet have refused to grow up, hence remained intolerant to their fellow human beings – yet, some of these “academicians” perform fraud representation – make superficial and dishonest studies to manipulate the obvious reality. Either they are blind or simply cynical!

Now back to the study…

When two Swedish economists set out to examine whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist, they knew how they would gauge economic freedom, but they needed to find a way to measure a country’s level of racial tolerance. So they turned to something called the World Values Survey, which has been measuring global attitudes and opinions for decades.

Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors.

If we treat this data as indicative of racial tolerance, then we might conclude that people in the bluer countries are the least likely to express racist attitudes, while the people in red countries are the most likely.

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The Terrorism and Political Violence Map

The Aon 2013 Terrorism and Political Violence Map, released on Wednesday, looks at 200 countries and is used as a gauge for the overall intensity of the risk of terrorism and political violence to business in each country – based on three icons indicating the forms of political violence which are likely to be encountered:

• Terrorism and sabotage

• Strikes, riots, civil commotion and malicious damage

• Political insurrection, revolution, rebellion, mutiny, coup d’etat, war and civil war

Neil Henderson, head of Aon Risk Solutions’ Crisis Management Terrorism team, said, “Terrorism is having an increasing impact on today’s global organizations and terrorist attacks are now regarded as a foreseeable risk. An attack not only on, but near an organization’s premises can result in human casualties, property damage, business interruption, legal liability issues and long term damage to brand and reputation.”

On the terrorism front, 44% of countries measured have a real threat of on-going terrorism. Although the report did not specifically define terrorism as religious in motivation, as has been the case throughout major U.S. and European terrorist outbursts, emerging market giants Russia and India were high on the list. Russia had a risk rating of three. India was worse, ranked four out of five.

Overall, Europe had the most positive regional outlook, with 47% of the countries seeing a decline to their risk ratings this year. Limited incidents of terrorism outside of Greece and Northern Ireland also accounted for lowered risk scores.

Middle East most unstable

As expected, the Middle East and Africa are the most unstable by far when it comes to terrorist risk. A total of 64% of those countries are rated a severe political risk, while North Africa, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan in particular faced the obvious bouts of extreme terrorism on a daily basis.

The Middle East is the most unstable region, according to the map, with 64% of countries assigned high or severe risk ratings. The risk of terrorism and sabotage was most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa, with 85% of countries in that region at risk, according to the research.

Oil rich countries were the most risky. Nigeria was ranked a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5 for terrorist risk, while Tanzania and Mozambique were on par with the United States and Canada at a ranking of 2.

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