http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/wor ... -morality/

What's this??

and they are wrong, belief in God is NOT ESSENTIAL to morality.

People believe all kinds of stuff. Moreover, many of our intuitions can clearly steer us wrong. Biases and prejudices, for example.

How the belief correlates to wealth and education is interesting. Not at all surprising though.

"Wealth" can be lots of things.
It can be material wealth and yet be utterly meaningless to happiness and well being.

"Education" is also not a firm word.
There are millions of educated fools, and informally educated but very bright people.

The study specified what it meant by wealth and education.

sure.., but that doesn't take away anything from my point.

unless of course they are mythicists, at which point you demand a PhD or you will troll them to death ant

Of course the people that believe in God are going to say that their belief in God makes them a more moral person.

There are some good reasons why in pre-modern societies belief in the existence of God supported morality. For example the idea that believers go to heaven after death while non-believers go to hell served as practical incentive for belief, until modern astronomy showed the absurdity of the literal triple-decker flat earth universe of the ancient simple myth. If you are a flat-earther, then of course believing in God will seem sensible.

But for the modern world, belief in God is bad news, because it replaces scientific evidence with a comforting mythical fantasy, providing incentive to believe traditional authorities rather than the evidence of our senses. The only moral value in God talk is symbolic parable.

We see the evil impact of belief in God in the appalling untrue arguments that many delusional conservative believers present about global warming. Climate change is the number one moral issue facing our planet, but you must have some respect for scientific method to understand that. I suppose mass extinction does not matter to you if you wrongly think you will go to heaven just for signing up to a creed.