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

[Morton K. Brussel]

I think you are going overboard, Phil. In fact, if I remember  
correctly, Monbiot stated that certain secularly oriented governments  
were as bad for their populations as any (He cited the Soviet Union  
and Nazi Germany [secular?]). I believe he was just having fun in  
teasing those who identify morality stems with religion, as his last  
quote flippantly indicated. Moreover, he never said anything about  
"proof", but correlations can be suggestive. A matter of inference  
here, not deduction.

Just my reaction.  Mort


On Oct 13, 2005, at 6:41 PM, Phil Stinard 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 <mincam2 at yahoo.com>
>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Are religious societies better than secular
>>     ones?
>> To: Peace <peace-discuss at lists.groogroo.com>
>> 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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