A new study shows that religious people have as much sex as atheists, but with less sexual satisfaction and more guilt.

Do atheists have better sex? Yes. According to science, that is -- and more specifically, according to the recently released "Sex and Secularism" study.

In January 2011, organizational psychologist Darrel Ray, Ed.D. (psychologist for 30 years and author of The God Virus as well as two books on psychology) and Amanda Brown (undergraduate at Kansas University, focused on sexuality and sex therapy) conducted a sex survey of over 14,500 people -- atheists, agnostics, and other people in the secular community. The survey was looking at religion, atheism, and sex: how religion affects sex, how leaving religion affects sex, whether lifelong atheists feel differently about sex than people who have recently deconverted, and so on. The report -- "Sex and Secularism: What Happens When You Leave Religion?" -- is on the Internet, and if you want all 46 pages of the naughty details, including the charts and graphs and personal stories, you can download it free (you just need to register on the site).

But if you just want to know the gist?

Leaving religion improves people's sex lives.

A lot.

Atheists and other non-believers, as a whole, experience a lot more satisfaction in their sex lives than they did when they were believers. They feel much less guilt about their sex lives and their sexuality. The sexual guilt instilled by so many religions tends to fade, and indeed disappear, when people leave religion -- much more thoroughly than you might expect. And according to the respondents of this study, non-believers give significantly better sex education to their kids than believers do.

Now, when it comes to people's actual sexual behavior, religion doesn't have nearly as much impact as you might think. Religious and non-religious people have pretty much the same kinds of sex, at pretty much the same age of onset, and at pretty much the same rate. Believers are just as likely to masturbate, watch porn, have oral sex, have sex outside marriage, and so on, as non-believers are, and they start at about the same ages. So it's not like religious sexual guilt is actually making people abstain from forbidden sexual activity. All it's doing is making people feel crummy about it. And when people leave religion, this crumminess decreases -- at a dramatic rate. Believers and atheists are having pretty much the same kinds of sex... but when it comes to the pleasure and satisfaction experienced during this sex, it's like night and day.

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Thus begins my latest piece for AlterNet, Atheists Do It Better: Why Leaving Religion Leads to Better Sex. To find out more about the new "Sex and Secularism" report on the sexual effects of religion and the lack thereof -- and to find out my analysis of the report and its implications, both for believers and for atheists -- read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!