Nothing riles your average atheist more than the thought that religious believers regard themselves as morally superior. I have encountered this attitude many times, and it doesn’t seem susceptible to disproof. Thus when I tell them that the most moral man I ever knew was my late father, whose atheistic antagonism to faith would have made Richard Dawkins sound like the Dalai Lama, they greet this as merely an exception that proves the rule. I can imagine their delight, therefore, at the findings of a study that seems to prove the opposite. Reported in The Guardian under the heading “Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds,” it describes a research project designed to measure altruism – in this case a willingness to share with othe