
A study has found that atheists are more closed-minded and less tolerant of different viewpoints than religious people are.
Those findings go against both conventional wisdom and atheists’ perception of themselves.
Why do you think religious people are relatively open-minded and why do you think atheists are relatively closed-minded?
Illustration: Atheist Atom Symbol by www.atheistatom.com (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
From Greg Wilford, Atheists are less open-minded than religious people, study claims | The Independent:
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”. . . .
[Keep reading. . .]
Read also this report. Here is the published study.