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

[Phil Stinard]

Good points, Dan.  The article refers to religion, but it is really 
referring to fundamentalist Christianity, which is one reason why the 
study's speculations are relatively worthless.  The questions used to gauge 
"religiosity" were whether you believe in God, church attendance, and 
whether you take the Bible literally.  That leaves out all of the world's 
other religions, and of course, it will result in the US having the highest 
score.  Then, the study based its conclusion that religiosity is correlated 
with societal ills by noting that all developed countries OUTSIDE the US 
have low religiosity and low crime rates, etc., and that the US has high 
religiosity and high crime rates, etc.  You can't base a correlation on two 
data points, the US vs. the rest of the world.

If a study wants to even BEGIN to try to make correlations and tentative 
conclusions about cause and effect, it should study individuals within the 
society.  Are criminals and STD patients more religious than the people who 
live clean lives?  To find out, you could survey convicted criminals and 
patients at STD clinics for their religious views (of any creed,  not just 
Christianity) and compare the results with a control group taken from the 
same communities.  Then you could do comparisons country by country, 
including non-Christian nations.  Monbiot and Gregory Paul aren't even close 
to doing this, but seem rather to prefer taking potshots at Christian 
fundamentalists, inventing or imagining an excuse to do so.

--Phil

>Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:48:12 -0500
>From: "Dan Schreiber" <dan at sourcegear.com>
>Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] RE: Are religious societies better than
>	secularones?
>To: "Phil Stinard" <pstinard at hotmail.com>, <brussel4 at insightbb.com>
>Cc: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>Message-ID: <JCEHJGJKOHFJIKKPADPKMENFMIAA.dan at sourcegear.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
>
> >  When I have more time tomorrow, I'll
> > write about
> > some methodologies that could help get at the question of whether
> > religion
> > is correlated with crime rate, etc.
> >
>
>I would guess the religion in question here is a particular kind of
>conservative, fundamentalist or even nationalistic Christianity, of the 
>kind
>that justifies exclusion and an agressive intolerance (against its founders
>intent, in my opinion).  If so, it isn't hard to imagine a correlation
>between that and other social ills.
>
>At the same time, it is a historical fact that many of the major leaps
>forward in human rights have been accomplished by people who were fervently
>religious, but got it right (see slavery,  civil rights).  In fact, 
>pacifism
>itself has been overwhelmining a religious stance until very recently in
>history.
>
>So, I think it is important to identify which kind of religion contributes
>to worse (or better) societies.