Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Department of Psychology, Buinzahra Branch, Islamic Azad University, Buinzahra, Iran
Abstract
Previous researches about the relationship between religious belief and morality have reached conflicting findings and this shows that the effect of religious belief on morality cannot be direct. Therefore, for the pathology of religious belief, it is necessary to see which characteristics of religious belief can contribute to which forms of immorality under which conditions. The present study hypothesized that attribution to God makes it easier to justify passive immorality (omission of actions) and makes passive immorality seem more acceptable. With the purpose of testing this hypothesis and in a correlational design, 499 participants (230 men) with an average age of 37 years were selected among 30,000 subscribers of Hamrahe Avval and Irancell living in Tehran and Karaj and were randomly assigned into two groups of passive immorality (who read six stories about passive immorality) and active immorality (who read six stories about active immorality). Religious belief was measured with the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2013), and attribution to God and acceptance of immorality were measured with a researcher-made questionnaire. Regression analyses showed that the subjects who had more religious belief attributed passive immorality to God more than the subjects who had less religious belief, attribution to God predicted the acceptance of immorality, and religious belief had a negative relationship with the acceptance of immorality after excluding the variance of attribution to God. Also, the Moderated Mediation Model showed that attribution to God can explain why religious believers accept passive immorality more easily. These findings show tha
Keywords
- religious belief
- attribution to God
- acceptance of immorality
- pathology of religion
- religious teachings
Main Subjects
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