[Peace-discuss] RE: Are religious societies better than secular ones?

[Chuck Minne]

You may be right, who really knows? 

In my case, the trouble is that I see no great evidence that Monbiot is wrong. Everything in my limited (and surely imperfect,) world view tells me he is right. 

Give me a word association test and say “Christian” and I will immediately respond “killer.” Say it again and I will respond “hypocrite.” I have no doubt that I am not 100% correct; but feel confident that I am much more right than wrong. Again, my world view is imperfect, I know that.

Not many people are killed in the name of atheism.

 


Phil Stinard <pstinard at hotmail.com> wrote:Monbiot's article is extremely annoying, because he's trying to base a 
"scientific" attack on religion in society on an a flawed review article in 
a religious journal that no one will probably ever read, but we're expected 
to take Monbiot's word for it. Well, I managed to find the journal and the 
article on-line, so here's the link: 
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

Those who take Monbiot's article even semiseriously, please read the review 
article and then ask yourself if the author, Gregory S. Paul, has proven the 
thesis laid out by Monbriot, that crime rate, abortion rate, STD rate, and 
other various societal ills are a direct result of a society's religiosity. 
Clearly, no such conclusions of cause and effect are drawn. The US stands 
out as having extraordinarily high rates of dysfunction, and since the US is 
categorized as being the most religious society in the study, it skews the 
correlations tremendously, but that doesn't PROVE anything. Here is the 
conclusion of Gregory Paul's article:

"The United States’ deep social problems are all the more disturbing because 
the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western 
nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 
2004). Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and 
per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other 
developed democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is 
therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth 
into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this 
failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which 
cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between 
social conditions and religiosity versus secularism. It is therefore hoped 
that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will inspire more 
extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions include the reasons, 
whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so 
inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal 
distress than are less religious, less wealthy prosperous democracies. 
Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having 
little in the way of the religious values or institutions? There is evidence 
that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus 
acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of 
societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and 
mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, 
marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, 
secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral 
and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the responsibility of the research 
community to address controversial issues and provide the information that 
the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses."

It's a really big stretch to go from Gregory Paul's conclusion to Monbiot's 
conclusion: "But if we are to accept the findings of this one -- and so far 
only -- wide survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who 
claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to 
behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not 
exist." First of all, Paul's article doesn't present any original findings, 
and secondly, it's not a wide survey of belief and human welfare. It's a 
review article, and it's hardly the first and only one. Monbiot's 
conclusion tells me more about Monbiot's biases and lack of critical skills 
than it does about the effects of religion on society.

--Phil Stinard


>Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 07:23:54 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Chuck Minne 
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Are religious societies better than secular
> ones?
>To: Peace 

>Message-ID: <20051013142355.56287.qmail at web50906.mail.yahoo.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
>Better Off Without Him?
>
>
>
>By George Monbiot, AlterNet. Posted October 13, 2005.
>
>Christian fundamentalists claim religion is associated with lower rates of 
>violence, teen pregnancy and divorce. A new study says they couldn't be 
>more wrong.
>
>
>
>
>Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy 
>question for athiests to answer.
>
>Most of those now seeking to blow people up -- whether with tanks and 
>missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes -- do so in the name of God. In 
>India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting fire 
>to human beings. A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications 
>network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women 
>ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united 
>in the cause of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalization of 
>assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence 
>of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the 
>mind of the believer than the non-religious infidel.
>
>But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities 
>on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more 
>limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British, 
>Germans and Belgians in Africa, and the British in Australia and India 
>could be said to have done their best). It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's 
>suspicion that "If God does not exist, then everything is permissible."
>
>Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are 
>moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest 
>goal one's own ego and one's own desires." (We must trust, of course, that 
>a man who has spent his life campaigning to become God's go-between, and 
>who now believes he is infallible, is immune to such impulses).
>
>The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, 
>but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone 
>who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should 
>we care about other people's?
>
>We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian last month, that 
>"good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that 
>heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt 
>that faith and charity go hand in hand."
>
>The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic missionaries. Joe Haas, an 
>Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West Papua, had spent his 
>life acting as a human shield for the indigenous people of Indonesia: every 
>few months soldiers threatened to kill him when he prevented them from 
>murdering his parishioners and grabbing their land.
>
>Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of northeastern Brazil, 
>thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was a gunman the ranchers 
>had sent for him. Yet still he opened it. With the other liberation 
>theologians in the Catholic church, he offered the only consistent support 
>to the peasants being attacked by landowners and the government. If they 
>did not believe in God, these men would never have taken such risks for 
>other people.
>
>Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the 
>question with which this column began. But in the current edition of the 
>Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the 
>hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that 
>religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide, 
>non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion." He compared data from 18 
>developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists 
>couldn't have got it more wrong.
>
>"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 ... None of the strongly 
>secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of 
>measurable dysfunction."
>
>Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and 
>Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, 
>marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization, 
>and acceptance of evolution approach European norms."
>
>Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion -- 
>especially absolute belief -- and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and 
>adolescent abortion. Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the 
>under-5s in Portugal, the U.S and Ireland and put the U.S. -- the most 
>religious country in his survey -- in a league of its own for gonorrhea and 
>syphilis.
>
>Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian societies are 
>"pro-life" is the finding that "increasing adolescent abortion rates show 
>positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... 
>Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are 
>therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."
>
>These findings appear to match the studies of teenage pregnancy I've read. 
>The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired 
>by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy rates. 
>The U.S. is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels comparable 
>to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than India, the 
>Philippines and Rwanda. Because they're poorly educated about sex and in 
>denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use contraceptives), 
>boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more likely to get their 
>partners pregnant than those who don't.
>
>Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the rankings cannot reflect 
>national poverty -- the U.S. has the world's 4th highest GDP per head, 
>Ireland the 8th -- the nations which do well in Paul's study also have 
>higher levels of social spending and distribution than those which do 
>badly. Is this a cause or an association? In other words, are religious 
>societies less likely to distribute wealth than secular ones?
>
>In the US, where governments are still guided by the Puritan notions that 
>money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and poverty is a mark of 
>moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds with the dispersal of 
>wealth. But the U.K. -- one of the most secular societies in Paul's study 
>-- is also one of the least inclusive, and does rather worse in his charts 
>than countries with similar levels of religion. The broad trend, however, 
>looks clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have ... come 
>closest to achieving practical "cultures of life."
>
>I don't know whether these findings can be extrapolated to other countries 
>and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example, at whether religious 
>belief is associated with a nation's preparedness to go to war (though I 
>think we could hazard a pretty good guess) or whether religious countries 
>in the poor world are more violent and have weaker cultures of life than 
>secular ones.
>
>Nor -- because, with the exception of Japan, the countries in his study are 
>predominantly Christian or post-Christian -- is it clear whether there's an 
>association between social dysfunction and religion in general or simply 
>between social dysfunction and Christianity.
>
>But if we are to accept the findings of this one -- and so far only -- wide 
>survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any 
>sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as 
>Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
>
>
>
>George Monbiot is the author of 'Poisoned Arrows' and 'No Man's Land' 
>(Green Books). Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article 
>originally appeared in the Guardian.


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[Frank Zappa]   
 

  






		
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