Or, rather, smart people become atheists because of sex, so says a psychology today blogger (HT: WWGHA).

The psychology today blogger describes this as a “silly reason,” and obviously he means to make it sound embarrassing. But it makes the most sense if you understand it in a less crude way. I grew up in a liberal Protestant family that took for granted that I would go into some career requiring specialized post-high school training, and get married no earlier than my mid-twenties (and even that would be young). Once I figured out that, contrary to what our sex-phobic “health” classes would have had us believe, there were lots and lots of people in the world having premarital sex without anything bad happening to them, the idea of delaying sex until marriage ended up seeming pretty silly to me. Nowadays, as a grad student, I’m used to hanging out with people who will agree with me when I say I have trouble relating to old friends who got married right out of high school.

But let me tell you about one of those friends. My friend was pretty smart, a couple teachers really liked him, but his parents didn’t encourage him to go on to college and eventually he told me that he just didn’t consider himself the college-attending type. Though I didn’t know her as well, my impression was that the situation with his older sister was the same: teachers liked her, but she didn’t have much motivation to go to college. My friend got married to his high school girlfriend a couple years after graduation. Though I never thought of it this way before reading the psychology today post, when you’re in that kind of sub-culture, the idea of delaying sex until marriage (or at least engagement) isn’t going to seem so obviously absurd.

What’s unclear here is why religion should be linked to sexual attitudes. The link does seem to be there, but why is it there? This issue becomes more puzzling when you notice that not all religions seem to endorse the same sexual ethic. The earliest books of the Bible seem to have been written for polygamous, slave-holding aristocrats, whole St. Paul’s letters seem to have been written for poor men who had no chance at a Solomon-like harem and who naturally resented men that had them.

I’m sure social scientists have interesting theories on the link between religion and sexual mores, but up til now I haven’t invested much effort in understanding them. So if you’ve read a good book (or even a good article) on the subject, do drop a comment with a mention of it.