Good Point
To the church, he's public enemy No. 1
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. ... The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly.
So imagine you did a correlation study about religious belief and social ills and your study came out with the above findings. This is what the author said about the study:
it is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health.
Even if that was the disclaimer on the study, it sure pissed a whole lot of church leaders off! I am actually happy that it did!
Most correlation studies show a relationship but do notcompletely link the to variables together. They just provide a basis for further study. But this one gets you wondering...hmmm for being such a religious country, what is wrong with us. With all the right wing Christian groups and churches hating gay people, ignoring the inner city poor, and repressing sexual health I cannot imagine how the US has gotten like it has. With everyone feeling so judged all the time in the US you would think that people would be on their best behavior.
This makes me wonder... If all Christians cared like Jesus did would the study say the same thing?
posted by Jonathan @ 2:51 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You say we are a religous country...we really aren't we have a lot of religous load mouths that make news. Look at Spain, Isreal, only one of the numerous Islamic countries in the Middle East. We are NOT a "religous" country. The above mentioned countries don't even attempt to seperate church and state. We have many different religions, and yes they have some sway. But so does the ACLU, NRA, corporations, and those are not religious. But the moral of your post is correct, but just wanted to clarify that one point.
According to the author, the point of his work was to show that societies could be successful without being religious.
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“In Western society, there are many, many secularized nations that are performing quite well socially. So that’s the main conclusion,” he said. “What I’ve done is I’ve falsified what I call the creationist social hypothesis, and I’ve done that forever. You can never make the claim again that it’s impossible to have a society that’s non-religious that does well.”
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This doesn't seem like an earth shaking revelation to me.
Besides, a nation can be secular and still have lots of people that are really into their faith. I guess I don't get why people would be all up in arms about this study.
People are up in arms because it tied together both religion and social ills. Basically it showed that even with a conservative religious atmosphere there is still going to be social problems, or even more social problems. This means, that Christians are not really doing Gods work! That I am not surprised about. Brian, we are not a religious "state" but many of our social policies and laws are based on the Christian faith. That was my point. But I am glad we all agree and love each other! :)
Brian makes an excellent point. there are plently of organizations and people who want to make sure we are not a "religious" country. It just so happens that Christianity is everywhere because many of our leaders are christian and, yes, lots of our loud mouths are crazy-ass hard core "christians." But i tell ya, if people actually wanted to act like Jesus did, all these abortion clinic bombering, anti-gay, don't give a crap about the poor (because this is american and the poor can help themselves) crazies would not exist. Jesus wouldn't stand for a lot of this shit, take it from me!
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