Just after Satoshi Kanazawa once again trashed the reputation of fringe field evolutionary psychology, independent psychology researcher Darrel Ray wants to tank clinical psychology.

His method for its destruction?  An online survey of people with a 'religious background' who left religion, of course.   14,500 people responded and, not surprisingly, the results skewed toward exactly what an atheist-who-was-raised-fundamentalist-Christian wants them to skew toward; that atheists have better sex lives.

Hey, surveys can't be wrong.  That's why George McGovern and John Kerry beat Nixon and George W. Bush so easily in their elections.  Oh wait, they didn't?

Ray didn't actually survey any religious people and instead drew a correlation between leaving religion behind and better sex.   So religious people could be having oodles of fantastic sex, as far as we know.   No one seems to be willing to survey them but if a woman tells you God says she has to do anything her mate wants, that is much more of a sure thing than some atheist girl with a lot of piercings - those women can be pretty hit and miss.

2011 is a time when conservatives really regret being outnumbered 1000 to 1 in academia.   Liberals have prettier daughters and atheists are more intelligent, we were also supposed to believe.  What do conservatives get?   Well, apparently big old oil wells in their back yards just for voting Republican, but that is little solace for having ugly daughters, lousy sex and being stupid.

How is someone claiming their sex lives got better after they stopped going to church science at all?  Especially when they self-rated their own guilt, which you can imagine likely correlates to how much they hate religion now?   It's a meaningless question.   Ray doesn't need to do good science, he just needed to get on "Good Morning America" and he found the perfect way to do it. 

But, logically, how would you expect them to rate their sex lives when given a choice between the period in their lives when they attended church and after they became Hellbound?

Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of two books on the subject of sexual behavior in adolescence and young adulthood, told ABC Ray used unscientific methods.


Ray may not understand science but he understands marketing - in this video, his book cover is the word 'sex' and a girl's ass.   'Come to atheism and have all the non-marital sex you can stand' is the message.

"It appears that it was a 'fill it out if you want to' kind of survey that is not random, not nationally representative, and relies entirely on self-selection," Regnerus said. "In other words, they have data from people who felt like filling out a survey on atheism and sex. As a result, I am not surprised at their findings."

Which isn't to say he isn't right, he might be, he just shouldn't pretend it is science.   It's instead a survey of like-minded people who self reported whether or not they had better sex after they became atheists.

In return for promoting his nonsense unfairly, here is equally nonsensical and unscientific evidence claiming Christian sex is way, way better:



"For decades I have heard that people felt their sex life was better once they left religion --- any religion -- but no one seemed to have examined this scientifically," Ray said.

To most of us, it is still the case that no one has examined this scientifically.

Sex and Secularism