Darrel Ray is an organizational psychologist who did an intensive study of the relationships between sex, guilt, and religion. Here's a graph he created from polls of 14,000 people, both religious and non-religious, that shows how many people by their own admission had engaged in various sexual acts by age 21 (left). The results are almost exactly the same for both groups. He also included questions about ongoing masturbation and pornography use (not graphed here). Again, the results were the same except that religious people use 5-10% MORE pornography and it increases as they grow older. He pointed out that the two states with the highest pornography use are Utah and Mississippi.
Ray detected two major differences between religious and non-religious people. First is the massive guilt burden carried by religious people (right) despite the fact that they continued to perform sexual acts that they found guilt-inducing (notice who scored highest!) Second is that religious people consistently lie about their sexual activities. In an interview in Richard Dawkins' Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life, Ray says that when he addresses non-religious audiences and asks "by the raise of hands, how many of you masturbate?" 80-90% of the people in the room raise a hand, but when he addresses a religious group and asks the same question NO hands go up. His conclusion, considering that the anonymous poll results are the same for both groups, is that religion really has no actual influence on sexual behavior, despite all of the preaching and condemning that goes on, except that it teaches people to lie about it.
Thoughts?
