PZ Myers. 2005 Sep 27. Sinners in the hands of an angry phantasm. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/sinners_in_the_hands_of_an_angry_phantasm/>. Accessed 2008 Aug 30.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Sinners in the hands of an angry phantasm
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“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 developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
Now, to be fair, I don't think this necessarily says that being religious is bad for the individual; it's just not good for a culture. I also think it's a bit sweeping in associating these ills with religious belief in general, because the US is afflicted with particularly malignant forms of religion (and at the root, the problem may not be religion itself, but irrationality and anti-intellectualism and ignorance, something our country has in volume). On the other hand, countries with more traditional religions also seem to have some serious problems (who knew Portugal was such a mess?).
But heck yeah, it seems obvious to me that if you base national policy on pious ignorance and the low-rent tribal power fantasies of a bronze-age gang of thugs, you're not going to cope well with the real issues of a modern pluralist society.
Here's some of the data, correlating god-belief with homicide rates and mean life expectancy. That little "U" that's typically floating off by itself as an outlier (and not on the good side) is us.
A = Australia
C = Canada
D = Denmark
E = Great Britain
F = France
G = Germany
H = Holland
I = Ireland
J = Japan
L = Switzerland
N = Norway
P = Portugal
R = Austria
S = Spain
T = Italy
U = United States
W = Sweden
Z = New Zealand
C = Canada
D = Denmark
E = Great Britain
F = France
G = Germany
H = Holland
I = Ireland
J = Japan
L = Switzerland
N = Norway
P = Portugal
R = Austria
S = Spain
T = Italy
U = United States
W = Sweden
Z = New Zealand
(via Omniorthogonal)
I've noticed that a few people are freaking out over this study, and are in denial. Mostly it is because they are misinterpreting it; it does not say that if you believe in God, you will get an abortion and start murdering strangers. It says that prevalent god-belief in a culture does not discourage that sort of behavior, and that more secular societies are clearly not hotbeds of sin and corruption.
If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.
Why this should be triggering such knee-jerk antipathy is a mystery to me; is denying the efficacy of religion and the perfection of American society, and providing evidence for same, such a horrifying idea to people? Apparently, it is.
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You might like this article:
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/9033/BLI/dotcommentary/index.htm
My favortie part:
"1 Corinthians 2:12-15 warns that those of the Spirit will always be misjudged and misunderstood because the things that we hold as TRUTH are foolishness to the world."
I love a mindset where the more wrong you are proves the more sound you are to God. How can you argue with that? -
I'm no Bible thumper, but I have to point out that:
a) 18 data points is not much upon which to make a correlation. There are only two countries in the Western hemisphere represented here. What's up with that?
b) I don't see much of a correlation here anyway. To be sure, you've got two significant outliers, the U.S. and Portugal, on both charts. But the cluster to the left on the homicide chart, well, how do you draw a line through that? Answer: you don't.
I have no doubt that the American brand of conservative Christianity does a lot of bad things for our country, but this just strikes me as the kind of sloppy partisanship that gives ammunition to those defending such thinking.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 07:23 AM -
I also think it's a bit sweeping in associating these ills with religious belief in general, because the US is afflicted with particularly malignant forms of religion (and at the root, the problem may not be religion itself, but irrationality and anti-intellectualism and ignorance, something our country has in volume)
What a sweeping bit o' ignorance, I would say. In the list of countries where is communist China, U.S.S.R, Cuba, or Khmer Rouge? They were/are god-less communists and should have been paradise for you.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 07:37 AM -
A couple of things on that chart look wrong to me.
1. What's with Portugal? It seems to be exactly the opposite of its culturally similar next door neighbor. I don't remember it seeming like a violent place, and the life expectancy looks awfully low for an EU country. I don't remember any polluted wastelands like the old Soviet Union or our own "cancer alley" in Louisiana.
2. What's with Denmark? It too has a life expectancy more in line with the Soviet Union, even though it is, like Sweden and Norway, one of the most progressive countries in Europe.
Could this be a typo on the chart? I don't know that PZ would have an answer at his fingertips, but maybe this blogg has some European readers that could clear this up.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 07:39 AM -
PZ,
Really disappointing. The US is far larger, and far more diverse than those countries.
Try looking at black vs. white homicide rates in the US.
http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/murder.html
"In 2002 blacks were 7 times more likely to commit homicide and 6 times more likely to be victims of homicide than whites. The rate of homicide victimization for 2002 can be summarized by race & gender."
I know you will all freak out and call me a racist for daring to post such data. But those are the facts. The CAUSES for differential rates are complex and tied up with poverty, education, etc. NOT inherent racial differences.
The claim that religious belief is responsible for a high homicide rate is about as absurd as claiming that it's due to race.#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 07:40 AM -
No islamic countries on that list either, how can one draw any inferences from this?
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 07:45 AM
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Geez, the correlation in the graphs look really weak. Ditto most of the other figures. They all look like what I'd call a star chart. And look at this comment from the article:
Regression analyses were not executed because of the high variability of degree of correlation, because potential causal factors for rates of societal function are complex, and because it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions. Nor were multivariate analyses used because they risk manipulating the data to produce errant or desired results,<5> and because the fairly consistent characteristics of the sample automatically minimizes the need to correct for external multiple factors (see further discussion below). Therefore correlations of raw data are used for this initial examination.
Given the star charts they published, no wonder the authors didn't even attempt any sort of statistical correlations. Even as a preliminary study, this looks like pretty thin gruel to me. -
LJ,
There are plenty of countries that are "off the charts." Colombia and South Africa. Not included. Only "good" countries. You know "civilized."
They also left off Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia, which happen to be "good" European countries, but ... oops .. with murder rates double the US.
Cant have them in there, messing up the data.#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 07:50 AM -
"In the list of countries where is communist China, U.S.S.R, Cuba, or Khmer Rouge?"
For those who are too lazy to read the linked paper above, the title of the paper is "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" (emphasis added). That tends to explain why certain countries are missing.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 07:53 AM - Even so, it's a pretty weak paper.
- One explanation is that there are a lot of (unpolled) Japanese visitors to the US who satisfy their blood lust away from home. Or maybe it's the number of research papers on evolution published each year in the US.
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For those who are too lazy to read the linked paper above, the title of the paper is "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" (emphasis added). That tends to explain why certain countries are missing.
Touché. The main point I was making was against a study that left out god-less countries and made the implication that religious belief caused this evil. They left something out. I mean you can't make a comparison if you don't have two things to compare.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 08:03 AM -
No one is claiming that the sole cause of societal dysfunction is religion. The paper limited the analysis to a subset of countries to minimize the number of variables, which is a perfectly reasonable, even necessary, thing to do.
The bottom line is that the US is far from being a great moral or even material exemplar--on average, it's a crappy place to live. Even I don't believe that religion is entirely causal, however, but is a symptom: countries that neglect their people, fail to support education for everyone, encourage greater and greater economic disparities, and retreat from high standards of civilized social behavior, like the US, will see more strife, more misery, and more religion in their populations.
And the important message here is that the high level of dumb piety in our country hasn't done diddly-squat to correct our problems, despite the promises of the high priests of religion. The claims of the moral peons of the religious right are empty air, just like the claims of the Maharishi, and ought to be regarded the same way: as dangerous lies. -
The paper only had church going and evolution on the graphs, were is the info on homicides and STD's?
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 08:11 AM
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LJ:
Name just one prosperous Islamic democracy. Yep. That's why they didn't include any.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 08:14 AM - Among prosperous democracies, it would appear atheism is a good thing. But actually, cause and effect are not clear. Do Americans turn to religion in the face of persistent social ills such as relatively high rates of homicide, sexually transmitted diseases etc., that seem intractable? Or does the religious nature of the society place obstacles to solving these problems?
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"Sinners in the hands of an angry phantasm"
This is the best post title ever. I laughed until I choked on my morning coffee.#: Posted by Nullifidian on 09/27 at 08:23 AM -
This study hasn't said or shown anything really. Their data is just a bunch of random figures out in the middle of nowhere. Honestly, sometimes this just proves the point that just because it is published it doesn't mean it can't be complete rubbish.
For example, note Spain which is a heavily Catholic country and compare it against New Zealand. They are more religious than we are (not that the authors bothered to quantify what degree of religiousity was significantly different) and have far less murders and higher life expectancy. Same thing with Italy and several other countries.
You don't need to include 'godless' regimes like the old USSR or anything to see their data is worthless.#: Posted by Joseph ODonnell on 09/27 at 08:24 AM -
Looks like the best interpretation of this data is that there's no correlation between these factors and that religion appears neutral with regards to life expectancy and homicides.
But still, that is *not* what the fundies want to hear. They want to hear that the most righteous wins.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 08:25 AM -
Or does the religious nature of the society place obstacles to solving these problems?
Looking over their data, I would say no for several reasons. The first is that the US is an outlier and is clearly an exception, yet many of the other religious countries on their charts don't seem to be disentegrating. Their data is absolutely inconsistent with a 'religion is societies' evil hypothesis and simply points to something being REALLY stuffed with the US.
It does however prove that just because a country is religious it doesn't mean that it won't be utterly stuffed up. It just shows that there is something seriously wrong with American culture somewhere, but I don't think religion is it. I think it's more to do with an anti-intellectual, anti-science and generally poor public attitude to social issues that many Americans have. Even though America is one of the most powerful countries in the world, vast inequalities exist in it between those who are rich and those who are worse off, such as blacks and other minorities. As has been mentioned earlier, these minorities have murder/crime rates that are through the roof.#: Posted by Joseph ODonnell on 09/27 at 08:32 AM -
The murder rates shot up sharply after the defeat of communism in Eastern Europe, mainly due to the fast economic stratification of society. In Yugoslavia, murder rate was 1 per million people per year before the fall of communism, and five wars and millions dead after the fall of communism.
The paper is pretty weak. Still, it is interesting. I would prefer to see a both a study within the USA on a microlevel (not the crude Red state - Blue state crap division), and a study that includes less 'prosperous' countries. The kind/type of religious belief needs to be accounted for, too, as the fear of a wrathful, vengeful God is going to elicit different set of social behaviors than belief in the God of Grace (or Buddhism for that matter).
I have argued several times before that religion is not the cause but a symptom. To be religious or not, and if so, which denomination to join, depends on many factors, most important being the religious belief of parents, childrearing philosophy of parents (Dobson or Spock), size of community one grows up in (City or Country) with correlated differences in social norms, taboos and behaviors, etc. -
I don't think the data on overall life expectancy and homicide rates are very strong, although one can see a mild correlation. However, if you read the paper, you'll see that there are strong correlations between religious beliefs and under 5 mortality, STD infection, and teenage abortion rates. That suggests that there is a definite correlation between religion and social pathology in the countries studied. However, correlation is not causation. Might there be stronger religious beliefs in the countries with high under 5 mortality, etc because the countries have major problems and people seek the opiate of religion to relieve their suffering?
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 08:38 AM
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While I am semi-skeptical of this paper, I do think that religion's supposed social benefits are vastly overstated.
My personal strong suspicion is that how people raise their children (especially in infancy and early childhood) is *the* strongest determinant of moral behavior, period. This is partly anecdotal and partly evidence-based.
If two Satanist parents cared well for their child, responded to them when they cried as infants, did not spoil them as toddlers, gave them structure and consistency and a rational upbringing, I would expect their children to be more moral and compassionate than the children of a Christian family that gave their children a neglectful, abusive, or *inconsistent* upbringing. I would also expect this to apply in reverse as well. I think that psychology has as much or more of an effect on morality than ideological techings. A great part of personal moral behavior is the capacity to feel *empathy*, which is a capacity related to one's early childhood imprints.
Note that I'm not saying that ideology is completely irrelevant either.
Another point I'd like to make in relation to this article is a possible explanation for why in some cases religious belief actually leads to increased crime, violence, etc.
The reason is, I suspect, that fanatical religious belief is a form of hedonism. I would call it intellectual hedonism; "I believe it because I feel it and it makes me feel good."
Someone who is willing to believe something just because it feels good to them regardless of the evidence for or against it's truth might be more likely to do things just because they feel good regardless of any evidence of their harmfulness.
Religion is anti-reason emotionalism glossed over by sophisticated pseudo-rational apologetics.#: Posted by Adam Ierymenko on 09/27 at 08:40 AM -
I like this sentence, Adam:
"Religion is anti-reason emotionalism glossed over by sophisticated pseudo-rational apologetics."
...and I agree with you. -
It does however prove that just because a country is religious it doesn't mean that it won't be utterly stuffed up. It just shows that there is something seriously wrong with American culture somewhere, but I don't think religion is it. I think it's more to do with an anti-intellectual, anti-science and generally poor public attitude to social issues that many Americans have.
Isn't that what I just said? -
"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."
- Jon Stewart#: Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari on 09/27 at 08:50 AM -
But heck yeah, it seems obvious to me that if you base national policy on pious ignorance and the low-rent tribal power fantasies of a bronze-age gang of thugs, you're not going to cope well with the real issues of a modern pluralist society.
What a beautiful sentence. Another example of why I love reading Pharyngula.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 08:51 AM -
Turkey is about the closest to a prosperous Islamic democracy we are going to find. Stretching the meaning of prosperous and democracy almost to breaking I admit.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:02 AM
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I missed the filtering for prosperous democracy.That was sloppy, sorry.
The words prosperous islamic democracy just do not even belong in the same sentence at present.
I would of liked to see the data for Turkey in there, it may become an EEC member so it is the closest thing to prosperous and islamic.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:15 AM -
I think we need to consider not only how religious the general populace of a nation is but how influential religion is in forming national policy and government decisions. Someone here mentioned that Spain has a very religious populace but I think the difference between Spain and the US is that the US has a much more militant religious wing that has a larger influence on policy formation. For instance, I believe, Spain legalized (or was seriously considering legalizing) homosexual marriages recently - the US would never even dream of doing this and in fact is trying to ban them with a constitutional amendment. What this shows is that in Spain Secularism wins out over superstition and religion amongst the nation's leaders and policymakers. This is certainly not the case in the US where Religion (paticularly fundementalist Christainity) seems to be a cornorstone of Bush Administration policy. So I think that it really depends on the militancy of the religion in a nation. The level of Dogmatism is key, I believe, because that is the nasty part of religious belief and that is the root of all the anti-intellectualism and anti-science.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:17 AM
- When is this study's data from? The USA's murder rate hasn't been more than 6/100,000 since 1998. The only two countries whose life expectancies I remember, the USA (77) and Japan (81), have life expectancies an entire year more than what is given in the study.
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Isn't that what I just said?
Wibbly wibbly D:
Indeed it was, I was responding to someone else however :p So I can claim innocence, innocence I tell you!#: Posted by Joseph ODonnell on 09/27 at 09:31 AM -
Interesting side-note: the article is written by Greg Paul, a well-known dinosaur/prehistoric life illustrator. He's noted for his very active "dancing" dinosaur poses. He's a proponent of the view that dinosaurs like Velociraptor are actually secondarily flightless birds, or are at least more crownward than Archaeopteryx.
#: Posted by Martin Brazeau on 09/27 at 09:32 AM
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I like your comment about "malignant forms" of religion. That is very true. Religious symbols that were formed 2000 or 4000 years ago are pretty friggin' useless now. And all these religious idiots keep trying to cram them down people's throats. Who wants to eat 2000 year old mummy jerky?
Religious symbols need to be re-valuated every so often for modern use. This means teaching people not to be so metaphorically challenged. -
I dunno, did the researchers control for Geriniol exposure? If not, the effects could have confounded their results:
"Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland."
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7036#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:41 AM -
Is the Journal of Religion and Society peer-reviewed?
What is its published impact factor?
Is the author a social scientist?
You know, I hate it when non-experts, like Demski, spout pseudo-science in those Creationist, so-called academic journal, on topics outside their fields.#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 09:45 AM -
2. What's with Denmark? It too has a life expectancy more in line with the Soviet Union, even though it is, like Sweden and Norway, one of the most progressive countries in Europe.
Heavy smoking and too much drinking is the main reasons for that. It's a pretty big issue, and is something a lot of resources are being spent on correcting, but obviously it will be years before there will be measurebly changes.
I would say that very few of the graphs actually show any connections between religion and the things measured. Two sets of graphs do though - the ones dealing with the number of abortions and teen births. Here the sexual education of the country have a big influence, and it's no secret that the US sex-ed is heavily influenced by the religous right.
I remember back to when I went to school, we had pretty good sex-ed when we were 12 or so, and it was possible to get condoms at the school for free (and you didn't have to ask for them, they were placed so you could get them, without anyone knowing about it).#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:45 AM -
Gerin oil, you will notice, is an anagram of religion.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:50 AM
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Is the Journal of Religion and Society peer reviewed?
What is its publication impact factor?
Is the author a social scientist?
Do you accept Creationist studies from non-peer reviewed, low impact factor articles written by "scientists" from other disciplines?#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 09:51 AM - Dawkins is very funny. But he misses the point that it is a symptom that reinforces the cause, not a cause itself.
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Is it just me, or is this study based mostly on assumptions and ambigious data? Granted, it raises important questions, such as why DOES the U.S. have such high crime rates compared to the rest of the developed world. But implying causation from this inconclusive correlation is no different than saying pirates keep the Earth cool because statistical data can show that, as the number of pirates roaming the seas has decreased over the last century, global temperatures have increased.
#: Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari on 09/27 at 09:55 AM
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'For example, note Spain which is a heavily Catholic country and compare it against New Zealand. They are more religious than we are (not that the authors bothered to quantify what degree of religiousity was significantly different) and have far less murders and higher life expectancy. Same thing with Italy and several other countries'
Spain is certainly not more religious than the USA. It's more of a 'cultural' religion rather than a guiding religion.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:56 AM -
Is the Journal of Religion and Society peer reviewed?
Yes, or at least so they say on the journal's main web-page.
"The Journal of Religion & Society is a refereed academic journal dedicated to the publication of scholarly research in religion and its diverse social dimensions. All submissions to the journal will be subject to blind peer review."#: Posted by on 09/27 at 10:06 AM -
Uber has a point. Lots of Catholic countries (Spain, France, Italy, etc.) have more of a "lip service" religiosity in their populous. Few people outside of little old ladies take religion seriously. If you ask them in a survey if they believe in God they'll say "yes", but it's different than in the USA. Here in the USA, there are lots of highly dogmatic Christians who vote their religion.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 10:08 AM
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One more point...
Some posters have mentioned Pol Pot, the USSR under Stalin, Hitler, etc. Leaving aside the question of whether Hitler was an atheist, a Christian, an occultist/new ager, or some bizarre schizophrenic combination thereof...
When I look at human history, something really jumps out. All the examples that I know of of major large-scale evil were driven and/or rationalized through ideologies with one common characteristic: a dogmatic insistence that they hold some special or exclusive claim to truth.
Communism, at least of the militant "red" form, was very dogmatic. Hitler taught a highly dogmatic form of racial nationalism. ... and of course religions such as Islam and Christianity are highly dogmatic.
So what really jumps out at me is that dogmatic ideology and the *kind of thinking* that it encourages is a Very Bad Thing, regardless of whether the dogma teaches that there is or is not a supreme being.
Note that I emphasized "kind of thinking." I think that dogmatic ideology tends to relate to a kind of psychosis. Whether the arrow of causation runs from dogmatism to psychotic tendencies or the other way (or both ways) is an open question.
Note that the USSR, Hitler, Europe in the middle ages, modern-day Christian Dominionists, and Islamists *all* absolutely *despise* objective evidence-based science. If you doubt this, search for these combinations of terms:
nazi "jewish science"
ussr lysenko
galileo
republican war on science
Here's a link to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
They dispise evidence-based thinking because it pokes holes in their bubbles. Note the way fundie Christians squirm and react emotionally when you show them a transitional fossil and compare it to how a doctrinaire Marxist reacts when you tell them about Shenzhen:
http://english.people.com.cn/english/200008/28/eng20000828_49109.html
The final dogma: all dogmatic thought must be destroyed.#: Posted by Adam Ierymenko on 09/27 at 10:09 AM -
Same thing with Italy and several other countries.
Italy is NOT a more religious country than the US. Recent studies show that Italians are much more likely to accept the fact of evolution, not to go to Church expect on Holdiays (observance is a key factor in measuring one's degree of religiosity methinks), more accepting of teenage sexuality, teen pregancy is enormously low becuase of condom use and so on and on.
More importantly, having lived over here for five years I can assure you that Italian religiosity is of a radically different type than the fundamentlist authoritariansm that is common in the US. Italians are overwhelmingly Catholic but disgree with the Pope on just about everything. They think of Americans as Puritans and can't understand why Americans get so damned riled up about seeing some gorgeous naked men and women on the television and newpapers.
The Spanish are leaning even more toward secularization than Italians. Zapatero is considered satan by la Santa Chiesa over here.
So the comparison is between seculalarist and secularizing Western Europe and the fundamentalist US.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 10:13 AM -
I'm suspicious of the data, although I haven't had time to go through the paper very carefully. I'm Portuguese and there's a general perception that our big neighbor is actually more religious than we are. Those who've ever been in Spain during Easter will know what I'm talking about...
#: Posted by Ricardo Azevedo on 09/27 at 10:14 AM
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I'm somewhat suspicious of the data, although I haven't had time to go through the paper very carefully. I'm Portuguese and, while I would readily admit that Portugal is indeed a mess as someone put it, there is a general feeling that our big neighbor is actually more religious than we are. Anyone who has been in Spain during Easter will know what I'm talking about. In any event, Portugal (or any other European country I know, for that matter) is certainly nowhere near the US in religiosity: maybe 50 years ago, but not now.
#: Posted by Ricardo Azevedo on 09/27 at 10:25 AM
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No one is claiming that the sole cause of societal dysfunction is religion. The paper limited the analysis to a subset of countries to minimize the number of variables, which is a perfectly reasonable, even necessary, thing to do.
When you have an almost infinite number of uncontrolled variables (differing histories,population densities, racial/ethnic makeups, geographies, etc,. etc.) it doesn't help to limit your sample size in order to eliminate a few variables. If they really wanted to try to study religion in isolation, they should have taken as many data points as they could (rather than arbitrarily cherry picking a few that supported their hypothesis) and then tried to correlate different measures with religious faith, hoping the other variables would cancel themselves out over the long average. As it stands, with this terrible correlation (on which they didn't do statistics because it wouldn't support their conclusions, don't kid yourself) you can't draw any conclusions other than the journal must be desperate for submissions. There's good social science, and there's bad social science. This study clearly fits into the latter category, but since it says something controversial, the popular media will pounce on it. And of course, when it gets (rightfully) decimated by the supporters of religion, it will just be another blow to the respectability of science.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 10:35 AM -
Italy is NOT a more religious country than the US.
Never claimed they were. I'm a New Zealander so I was reffering to my country in comparison with Italy and Spain, who ARE more relgious than 'us' (New Zealand ;)). We're even worse for religion than either of them down here, heck, when a bunch of creationists dumped DI propaganda on schools they just binned the junk and ignored it. No public rows, only a single report in one newspaper and pretty much nobody else cared (Oh and the usual condemnation from the scientific establishment, which everyone ignored, because well, as I said, nobody down here cares about ID we have better things to do with limited resources, like actual science).
I was comparing those countries with mine not America.#: Posted by Joseph ODonnell on 09/27 at 10:43 AM -
Religion is a form of self-medication whose side effects are often worse than the pain it is supposed to relieve.
I doubt if a lack of religion leads to societal decline, but it's a good bet that economic and social disruption leads to increased religiosity. The Bush Administration is currently conducting a continent-wide trial of my hypothesis.#: Posted by Jim Harrison on 09/27 at 10:46 AM -
Uber and Dave have a point in need of updating. In the past, Spanish people used to smell of incense to avoid la Santísima Inquisición and later, under el hijo de puta Franco, el paredón. Today, Spain is a liberal, secular, no, anti-religious country with a godless Socialist government.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 10:50 AM
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I think the whole point is that despite what people like Pat Robertson constantly say a more religious and pious country does not mean that it will be a more functional society and in fact a nation whose populace are highly dogmatic (and I think this is the key) are more likely to have social problems. I think this make sense because dogmatism leads to intolerance and dogmatic people try to silence dissent. So embracing Pat Robertson-style christanity will probably make a nation worse off which contradicts the basis of the entire Fundementalist evangelical movement in my opinion. I think this is pretty clear even without this study.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 11:02 AM
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Name just one prosperous Islamic democracy.
Indonesia.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 11:15 AM -
Yes but what is the homocide rate/life expectancy rate/etc. in Indonesia?
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 11:21 AM
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I think there is a great deal of confusion about causes and effects as a general matter here. I don't think that religion is just an "effect" or some kind of epiphenomena in relation to social circumstances. Ask yourselves the follwing question: What is wrong with the unscrupulous manipulation of the poor? I think that's a rhetorical question. I agree with you that the poor are more liable to be manipulated, but that doesn't justify its occurence nor justify the religions themselves or their leaders who prey on these people's ignorance. To me that is what religion is, does and will always be.
Religions are fundamentally based on the rejection of this world in favor of something that doensn't exist. I find that morally repugnant and I do everything in my power to oppose it. It concerns me a lot more than politics does, because I believe very profoundly in the power of ideas and words to effect people's behavior even more than social circumstances.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 11:31 AM -
"Horrifying"
It's horrifying that people concoct misleading pseudo-science to promote a social, political agenda. That's what Creationists do.
Any scientist should be ashamed to quote and link uncritically to such a thing.#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 12:06 PM - You're going to have to work much harder to show that it is misleading pseudoscience. Criticize the actual paper, rather than your boneheaded, kneejerk misinterpretations of it.
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The average U.S. data is too broad to be useful.
Break the U.S. data down into any meaningful subset and that destroys the study’s argument, its “refutation of the claim of a benefit of religion.” Whether the study is making a positive or negative claim is irrelevant. It is deliberately using average U.S. data, when more homogenous subsets are readily availability and more useful to understanding a large, diverse country.
That's not "boneheaded and kneejerk."#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 12:22 PM -
Since we've gotten down to the ad hominem phase of the comment thread, I have made my point and I'm done.
#: Posted by The Commissar on 09/27 at 12:26 PM
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Re: Your addendum
PZ,
You said:
I've noticed that a few people are freaking out over this study, and are in denial. Mostly it is because they are misinterpreting it; it does not say that if you believe in God, you will get an abortion and start murdering strangers. It says that prevalent god-belief in a culture does not discourage that sort of behavior, and that more secular societies are clearly not hotbeds of sin and corruption.
Fair enough; that's more or less what the study said, as methodologically suspect as it was. However, in your original post, you did seem (at least to me) to imply that the study supported the contention that religiosity was correlated with all these bad things, just as did the news article that you cited did. Referring to the study, you seemed to buy into what the news article said about it:
Now, to be fair, I don’t think this necessarily says that being religious is bad for the individual; it’s just not good for a culture. I also think it’s a bit sweeping in associating these ills with religious belief in general, because the US is afflicted with particularly malignant forms of religion (and at the root, the problem may not be religion itself, but irrationality and anti-intellectualism and ignorance, something our country has in volume).
I’ll give you credit for calling the claimed association “a bit sweeping.” Unfortunately, the problem is that you can’t really determine from this study whether there is or is not such a correlation in the first place, much less conclude from it that religion is “just not good for a culture.” In fact, you can’t really conclude anything from this study. The sample is too small, and there is no correlation presented that passes even the most minimal statistical or scientific muster. As I said before, it’s all “star charts.” Yes, the authors do not claim a causal relationship, thus sparing themselves from the “correlation does not equal causation” charge, but unfortunately they don't even manage to show convincingly the correlation claimed. Even as preliminary work, this study sucks big time.
PZ, I gotta say I’m a bit disappointed. You usually have much higher standards than this. - I meant to say: You usually have much higher standards than this, such that even when I disagree with you I have to take you seriously.
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I'll defend the work. It's very specific in scope, and you're imposing interpretations on it that were not made.
It is the case that the US is an incredibly religious nation. It is the case that our leaders claim that this is a virtue. It is the case that there is an increasing involvement of the religious, especially on the right, in secular affairs. It is also the case that our country is a mess of contradictions, with abominable social inequities, urban crime, and now with the most religious administration in memory in office, a history of international atrocities and unjust war.
The only objection I have to the paper is that what it states is too trivial and obvious: religion has not helped us in any way on these matters, and that other states that are not afflicted with the godly meddlers in secular affairs are doing better than we are.
As I mentioned in the article, I don't view religion as causal, but as symptomatic. We're screwing up our culture in multiple ways. But the answer is not to turn to religion, that false hope and refuge of charlatans.
I'd also add that the claim that the US is too big and diverse is a red herring. Go ahead and break it down into smaller units, and as the paper mentions, you'll see the same thing: religiosity is correlated with poverty, with crime, with poor educational systems.
And just for the Commissar, it's also correlated with the right-wing red states. -
As the guy who writes The Daily Howler warns, always be suspicious of stories that are too pleasing. So I knew the headlines to the news reports about this study were too good to be true.
When sending the study back for re-working and expansion, let me add this suggestion: Check out the data for greatest belief in a devil. That's one of the places the US really sticks out, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a closer correlation. -
I don't think that all American religiosity should be lumped in with the Religious Right. There's also more-or-less European-style "cultural" religiosity, and also what might be called a Religious Left. But we've seen very little of the Religious Left; they have even gotten together some months back to mourn their lost political clout.
But just the same, this study makes some interesting points; I think it's worth exploring further.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 01:30 PM -
where is communist China, U.S.S.R, Cuba, or Khmer Rouge?
'Khmer Rouge' is a political party, not a country.
And the USSR isn't a country anymore. Sorry.
Try paying more attention in geography class.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 01:31 PM -
Paraphrasing Homer Simpson:
"Religion: the cause of -- and the solution to -- all of life's problems!"#: Posted by on 09/27 at 01:36 PM - Japan is another difficult part of this study. The chart indicates that they have a low belief in god. However, there are religious shrines all over that country. Shintoism isn't monotheistic. Thus, only the Christians in Japan are reflected in the study. That is a bit of a flaw...
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Judging from the response here, and from what I know generally about the religious climate in the US, I expect Creighton University, the origin-place of the study, to be attacked by a thousand conservative Christian voices.
My original thought was that the news article on the study, which was published in the UK, could never have been printed in the US. It wouldn't have made it through editorial boards.
I am actually hoping for the Christian roar of outrage, though, so that stories about the CONTROVERSY will get published. Americans in general will get to hear a new idea vis a vis the impact of religiosity in the US. -
Since we've gotten down to the ad hominem phase of the comment thread, I have made my point and I'm done.
The quintessential expression of the troll:
1) Throw around a lot of snide innuendo and crude parodies of your opponent.
2) when someone finally argues back, cry persecution, claim you're above it all, then disappear.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 01:47 PM -
The quintessential expression of the troll
George, it would be very wrong to think that The Commissar is a troll. He is fighting on the side of science, and does heck of a job debunking Intelligent Design Creationism.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 02:10 PM - Right. Not a troll, just misguided, mistaken, and delusional.
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PZ,
Unfortunately, you haven't really addressed the study's true shortcomings: That its sample size is too small and that the authors didn't bother even to attempt to show any statistics that actually show correlation, mainly because the graphs presented are too much star charts to make any real conclusions one way or the other. Heck, I've done experiments that produced graphs that looked like the ones in this paper, looking for correlations, for instance, between the level of certain factors and tumor invasiveness and aggressiveness. I didn't bother even to try to publish the results, except as examples of zero correlation, because I knew reviewers would have a hearty laugh before dropping my paper into the cylindrical file, where it would have belonged had I tried to overreach so much. (I wish I could find a journal with reviewers as lax as those for The Journal of Religion and Society apparently are. I'd probably have 100 publications by now...)
Besides, how am I misinterpreting? Here is a direct quote from the paper:Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developing democracy norm. Mass student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more (National School Safety Center) than all the secular developing democracies combined. Other prosperous democracies do not significantly exceed the U.S. in rates of nonviolent and in non-lethal violent crime (Beeghley; Farrington and Langan; Neapoletan), and are often lower in this regard. The United States exhibits typical rates of youth suicide (WHO), which show little if any correlation with theistic factors in the prosperous democracies (Figure 3). The positive correlation between pro-theistic factors and juvenile mortality is remarkable, especially regarding absolute belief, and even prayer (Figure 4). Life spans tend to decrease as rates of religiosity rise (Figure 5), especially as a function of absolute belief. Denmark is the only exception. Unlike questionable small-scale epidemiological studies by Harris et al. and Koenig and Larson, higher rates of religious affiliation, attendance, and prayer do not result in lower juvenile-adult mortality rates on a cross-national basis.<6>
They are claiming positive correlation between "pro-theistic factors" and juvenile mortality and decreased life spans. (It also occurs to me, given that the U.S. and Portugal are such obvious "outliers" on graph of homicide rates as a function of belief in God, it would be interesting to see what happens if you remove them. If you do, the curve would suddenly be at least flat and maybe even trending slightly downward, showing a slightly negative correlation between homicide rates and religiosity. So wouldn't the better question from that graph be what makes Portugal and the U.S. such outliers, rather than claiming that belief in God correlates with increased homicide rates?)
Next the authors claim correlation between belief in a creator with adolescent abortion rates:Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S.
And again for emphasis: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 (Figures 1-9).
The problem is, the graphs there show no such thing, at least not convincingly. The numbers are too low; there's way too much scatter; and I'm guessing that, had they bothered to actually do the proper statistics that the r^2 value would be around 0.1 or 0.2. Yeah, they make some qualifications and state that their inability to find a correlation refutes the religious who claim that increased devotion to religion has societal benefits, but you can't escape that the authors do, in fact, claim a correlation between religiosity and various bad things, like homicide and adolescent abortion on the basis of exceedingly flimsy evidence indeed.
The authors may be correct, but this paper sure as hell isn't even mildly persuasive evidence that they are. - Am I reading <a href=http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11fig/fig1.jpg>this graph</a> wrong or do only ~42% of atheist and agnostics in the US accept human evolution?
- Oops, didn't realize those tags don't work here.
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Start here:
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion.
Next, look at the US. High religious belief, high crime, high poverty. That datum alone is sufficient to say that the assertion is false, unless you want to argue that if we stripped away our religion, America would collapse into anarchy and chaos. Compare it to other countries, and you don't need a statistically significant trend line to see that secularism is not damaging in any way to society. Take the US out of the data set, even, and the complete absence of any statistical correlation between religion and stability wipes out the positive claims of the religious.
As a skeptic, you should be able to recognize who is making the positive claim here, and it ain't the atheists. That what little correlation they do see is negative is simply icing on the cake.
Do you also support the Maharishi effect because there is a lack of statistically significant support for their claims? -
Japan is another difficult part of this study. The chart indicates that they have a low belief in god. However, there are religious shrines all over that country. Shintoism isn't monotheistic. Thus, only the Christians in Japan are reflected in the study. That is a bit of a flaw...
Japan might be more complex than you know. Most of the active religious sites that I've seen in Japan have been Buddhist, which is an atheist religion. Very few Japanese are still really into Shinto (according to every Japanese person I've asked). In fact, most of the Japanese folks that I know aren't particularly interested in religion at all. I would describe it as being very agnostic or atheist - one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. It's the complete opposite of the "every human has an innate desire to know God" that I was taught growing up. -
I think I have to side with Orac here.
If the study is simply saying what PZ writes above in #41918, then it hasn't added anything to the discussion really. Data showing that the U.S. has higher rates of... well pretty much every negative variable one can think of
compared to other Democracies have been available for quite some time. The liberal Christians who believe as above have never had the facts on their side.
I agree with Orac that the study is trying to say more than that, and doesn't offer very convincing data to back it up (despite the fact that my gut agrees with them).
If I can make a larger comment that might be relevant here: I think there can be a tendency for people to expect less of social science research than they would of other fields. This is partially justified since the SS are handicapped by studying phenomenon which are exceedingly complex and difficult to control. But you don't have to therefore just accept any old thing as good work.
The media seems to have a particular soft spot for showcasing mediocre social science research that goes way beyond the data in its conclusions. I think this study is a typical example of that.
Okay, end of sermon.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 03:44 PM -
I don't even think that this study shows that the statement that "religious belief is socially beneficial ... help[ing] to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion" is false.
Here's a simple hypothetical: suppose that practice "X" indeed reduces societal-ill "Y", but not very effectively. Nonetheless, we might expect that population groups where "Y" is higher would increase the rate at which they adopt "X". Since "X" is only mildly effective, the positive correlation between "X" and "Y", which is due to the fact that the more "X" there is, the more "Y" people want, will remain.
To give a concrete example of this, let "X" be "throwing people jail" and "Y" be "crime rate" -- in this case, the hypothetical is quite plausible, though certainly not proven. I'm not saying that this model, with "X" being "adopting a belief in God", and "Y" being any of the ills mentioned, is likely to be correct -- but it's far from a ridiculous possibility, and must be addressed by anyone who is trying to show that religion is detrimental, or at least unhelpful, to society.
Also, I don't believe that "liberal Christians" have made any *scientific* claim to support their belief -- it is this paper that is making a scientific claim, and should give data that is a bit stronger if it even wants to make a claim of positive or even zero correlation.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 04:15 PM -
Japan might be more complex than you know. Most of the active religious sites that I've seen in Japan have been Buddhist, which is an atheist religion
Not exactly atheist, so much as nontheist. It denies the existence of a creator god, yet it doesn't deny (or insist on) the existence of numerous deities. These deities can be very important to people's practice, or not.
Very few Japanese are still really into Shinto (according to every Japanese person I've asked). In fact, most of the Japanese folks that I know aren't particularly interested in religion at all.
I've also heard that Buddhism isn't that big a deal in Japan anymore, except for big life-transition type ceremonies, such as funerals.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 04:16 PM -
This "study" will get lots of ridicule (or as you put it, "antipathy") because it's hysterically stupid. This is propoganda, not science. Finding correlations between something as general and vague as a nation's alleged religiosity and societal "good"? Heh. I bet plenty other correlations are supported by the same evidence:
"Countries that eat fish likely not to believe in God" : "Countries that that speak English likely to commit suicide" : "Countries that that have a state church likely not to win at the Olympics" : "Countries that that have State-dominated media sources likely to suppress and marginalize religion."#: Posted by on 09/27 at 04:39 PM -
PZ,
As a "skeptic," I observe that what "little" correlation between religiosity and various societal parameters that the authors claim to see is " negative," as you have put it. I'm glad you seem to agree that the authors have, in fact, asserted that there is a negative correlation betwee increasing religiosity and at least some societal parameters examined (one of which, as I pointed out, the authors called "striking," although on what basis they observe that that I still have no idea). Where my skepticism comes in is over whether the authors have, in fact, actually shown what they claimed to have shown. I argue that they have not. Not even close. Their data was so crappy that they didn't even bother to try to do statistics on it because, most likely, they knew such an analysis wouldn't have even shown a whiff of significance. (They all but admitted that such analysis would be futile in the text.) In fact, their data does not even even convincingly show zero correlation.
As for the Maharishi effect, I'm surprised you even mentioned that. It's apples and oranges. The authors of this paper are claiming negative correlations that their data does not support. In contrast, the Maharishi effect involves incorrectly claiming causation from observed correlations. Those are two different fallacies.
Personally, I tend to believe that there probably is no consistent or even detectable correlation between religiosity and the various societal parameters that the authors examined, like homicide, teen abortion, etc. However, the authors have not shown this, mainly because their analysis is so dubious. You seem to think I'm reacting this way because some sacred cow of mine (religion) has been gored. In that you may be more correct than you know, but, I suspect, you have the wrong sacred cow in mind. Good science is about as close to a sacred cow as I have, and it is that sacred cow that the authors have gored.
That is why I've come down so hard on this study. Worse, it's a big fat easy target for fundamentalists to trash and actually be correct as they trash it. -
Some posters are saying that the US and Portugal are "outliers" and that this somehow invalidates the analysis. Come on, not true. Standard pearson or product-moment correlations measure the strength of a LINEAR relationship; what the graphs actually suggest is a highly NONLINEAR relationship. A stronger believe in god has an ACCELERATING effect on those nasty indicators of societal degradation, which is "even worse" news for god's fans. Of course I'm not suggesting there's a causal effect but it's a bit silly to dismiss the conclusions based on a narrowminded linear analysis. Besides, if the rest of the world were included in the analysis the correlation would be way way stronger. The authors of the paper tried to control for obvious income/poverty effects, but might have done it in a more sophisticated way.
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 05:36 PM
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Not exactly atheist, so much as nontheist.
That's a much better word. One of the nice things about this blog is that there's always someone to correct you (no matter what you say!)
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Mightn't the prevalence of religion and the prevalence of violence both stem from the same underlying cause (the prevalence of ignorance and irrationality)?
#: Posted by on 09/27 at 05:52 PM
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"Name just one prosperous Islamic democracy. Yep. That's why they didn't include any."
Oh, come on. Turkey. And it bills itself as the most secular of the Islamic states, too. And funny, Iraq was pretty damn prosperous AND secular too before we invaded. Of course, it wasn't all that dramatic, but still.
I think the important thing is that the study shows that secular societies are NOT the "hotbed" of inequity and sin that fundamentalist cultures (U.S. included) tend to portray them as...#: Posted by on 09/27 at 05:55 PM -
The study may indeed be flawed, but even if it were not it probably wouldn't have any effect on the general belief that religion is good for a society. From what I have seen, the devout tend to think of religion's benefits in specific, personal terms and stories which assume the religion is being sincerely held and followed. Bad behavior means true religion was rejected in favor of mere lip-service. Thus, religion is always 100% good for a society.
It's a bit like the 100% success rate of "abstinence-only" sex education. If there were studies showing that unintended teen pregnancy rates go through the roof when this is the only program given in schools, it would make no difference to its advocates. Abstinence-only sex education is still counted as a 100% successful program because only those teens who ignore or abandon it get pregnant.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 06:00 PM -
DevilsAdvocate,
I don't think it's unreasonable to point out what outliers the U.S. and Portugal are on this one analysis. For one thing, if you're going to postulate a nonlinear correlation, then in order to include those two data points, then just eyeballing the graph as posted, I'd have to guess that it would have to be a at least a second order polynomial function--unlikely. Second, if the outliers are removed, the graph then looks like a linear regression analysis would fit the data pretty well, with a slope close to zero, indicating no effect one way or the other--in other words, no correlation. -
"Name just one prosperous Islamic democracy. Yep. That's why they didn't include any."
I think 'prosperous' was intended here to limit it to Islamic democracies that are as rich as typical first world nations. So the answer there would probably be 'none'. But if you loosen the wealth requirement, Turkey and, wait for it, Iran both qualify. Ugly as Iran is, they are a democracy, and their national elections aren't much dirtier than ours.
I think the important thing is that the study shows that secular societies are NOT the "hotbed" of inequity and sin that fundamentalist cultures (U.S. included) tend to portray them as...
True, but I think anyone the least bit well informed about the rest of the world wouldn't believe that anyway. It's hard to believe that, say, Finland, Japan, and Belgium have MORE 'inequity and sin' (or did you mean 'iniquity'?) than America. No matter how 'religious' America gets, our overall level of inequity and sin never really shrinks.#: Posted by on 09/27 at 06:57 PM -
It's disappointing how many of this paper's critics here misinterpret its explicit scope and aims:
This study is a first, brief look at an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by social scientists. The primary intent is to present basic correlations of the elemental data. Some conclusions that can be gleaned from the plots are outlined. This is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health.
This sort of half-cocked overreaction is probably (no, I dunno how you'd test this) the reason why this seems to be, as stated, the very first study of these issues. When the most detailed & rigorous criticism in this forum comes from someone who repeatedly slams "the authors" of a one-writer report, it's obvious that big red buttons are being pushed hard.
If "real science" is in large part a matter of disproving hypotheses, what Gregory Paul does here to Dr. B. Franklin's claim that “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others” is a small but meaningful contribution, even when the conclusion drawn is, as several objectors here assert, "no correlation".#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:10 PM -
The US is far larger, and far more diverse than those countries.
Er, bigger, sure. Diverse?
Would you like to look at, say, percentage of foreign-born citizens or something?#: Posted by on 09/27 at 09:35 PM -
a cool study that's had a lot of response in media worldwide.
how does malaysia rate in the prosperous/democratic stakes? a bit iffy on both, maybe.
socially and culturally (and racially, as it happens) homogenous societies do tend to have better stats. eg japan and finland etc.
and a lot of the "outlier" status may lie with the US' embrace of extreme forms of capitalism and individualism as well.
but lets stick with secularists 1 supernaturalists 0. and wait for the DI to come up with a study proving atheism causes herpes.#: Posted by rob stowell on 09/27 at 10:28 PM -
I blogged about this earlier tonight, here.
I didn't say so in my posting, but the reaction I'm seeing makes me wonder if this is one of those watershed papers that marks the beginning of a new era. Will we now see a broad investigation of the phenomenon of religious behavior from a scientific perspective? I sure hope so... -
The argument that the results are invalidated because the US is larger and more diverse than those other countries is simply bogus and nonsensical. The effect of such a 'problem' should be to bring the US's values closer to a mean; unless, of course, you expect that carving it up into smaller granularities would reveal that all those homicides and abortions were being carried out by just the atheist part of the population, and the christian majority were saintly.
We already know that isn't the case.
I wouldn't mind seeing a state-by-state breakdown of religiosity vs. those other problems. I suspect it would reinforce the message of the paper even more. -
Almost 12 percent of the roughly 9 million people living in Sweden are foreign-born.
#: Posted by on 09/28 at 06:51 AM
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I think many commenters are misinterpreting this data (I haven't read the whole lot, so apologies to anyone who's already made this point).
The hypothesis being tested is "religiosity leads to moral behavior", NOT "religiosity leads to immoral behaviour". The data show no correlation between religiosity and behavior. Therefore, the hypothesis in question is in deep trouble.
The whole point is that there is no correlation - i.e. that religiosity and morality are unrelated.. I thought that was obvious.#: Posted by on 09/28 at 07:01 AM -
Dunc,
"That religiosity leads to better behavior and societal benefits" may be the main hypothesis being tested (as I have acknowledged, certain commenters' claims that the paper is being "misinterpreted" notwithstanding). However, in the results and discussion the authors do make claims for correlations between religiosity and increased rates of homicide and increased rates of teen abortion, among other bad things. None of these correlations are supported by the data presented, which has so much scatter in it that no real conclusions can be made with any degree of reliability and for which not even a rudimentary statistical analysis is attempted. If the authors had simply said only that there is no correlation between religiosity and all the societal ills they looked at, rather than claiming that they did happen to find some negative correlations (one of which they even described as "stri