I am presenting this out of curiosity. Please make no assumptions as to my beliefs on the subject one way or the other.
From the Journal of Religion and Society, entitled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies”:
In replying to this post, keep in mind that this is not a discussion as to whether or not people who subscribe to one religion or another are idiots or not. It is not a discussion about whether or not there is “something up there.” It is not a discussion about whether or not we evolved from dolphins. etc. etc. I know all those other subject seem so exciting, but please try to stay on subject. Whenever one asks questions about religion on SDMB, it’s often only a matter of time before they’re derailed.
This is a discussion about the data in the study. Does this correlation between religious piety and societal strife exist? (Please provide as much statistical evidence for or against as possible) If so, why? For instance, if Jesus said love thy neighbor, why do so many people not appear to be treating their fellow man too well in a country where so many people claim to be practicing Christians?
What other evidence is relevant that is missing from the statistical analysis? Is there any statistical evidence that could disprove or put into question the possibility of a correlation between the religious devotion of the people and crime?
It would be difficult to link causation for a lot of these. Point in fact, I doubt there is any beyond the basic link between income and religiosity, and most of what you are seeing is income and American law.
The only comparison of those listed that might be viable is versus Japan, but Japan is still living in the 50s, has a healthier diet, and is liable to make up data.
America has a few issues that no other country has:
Something like 20% of our current populace are the descendants of people who were fully uneducated and had no legal right to own anything ~150 years ago. They were still being held back in all educational and social organizations until 40 or 50 years ago. While we have certainly made some impressive leaps in the last 50 years, that’s still a rather heavy albatross to get off from our neck.
The US is more libertarian than other countries. Libertarians aren’t concerned with a lot of the statistics that the left holds up as gods.
There’s no guarantee that the current lead in those statistics that other countries have will be maintainable in the long run.
I’m not the least bit surprised. You can find the same correlation within the United States. Not sure why this is the case. My only theory is that man has an inate moral sense and that any external limits/influence from religion just make things worse. Kinda like messing with the free market.
I can only speak from personal experience here, which is a sample of one (or possibly two if you count my ex christian ex wife) but my mental health has improved significantly in the 3 years since I shed my christian world view. Decisions are much easier to make, and the actions of other people in my life make more sense when interpreted based on rationalism.
Well, all the study really proves is correlation, which makes the factors that were controlled for – i.e. their sufficiency to exclude other possible causation – the most viable route of attack against it.
In total, however, I don’t see at least certain aspects as counterintuitive – for instance, the promise of an eternal, paradisiac life does place implicitly less value on the life in the here and now than the absence of such a promise does. I’ll have to do a more thorough reading of the study, though.
So I don’t really see many lines of attack other than attacking the data itself; however, the conclusions one draws from the studies’ results are a more or less personal matter.
Sorry for yet another post in a row (shoulda read the whole thing before posting), but I think the study actually refutes this correlation, seeing how the US is, despite being the most religious developed democracy, also the wealthiest in a per-capita sense.
You’ll notice that the US is down between Kenya and Uganda and such places. Sweden, Denmark, and France on the other hand top the chart out. Japan is somewhere mid-between, maybe leaning towards the US.
Sweden and Denmark, for instance, have something like an 80% tax rate (once you add them all up, the US is more like 40%:
An 80% hand in the pot is some pretty major wealth redistribution.
Now I suspect that the US would be more in line with Japan once we deal with getting the racial history solved. I don’t think that the US’s income disparity is as much due to our libertarian stance.
The point is, wealth as measured by GDP is not well corrolated, amongst developed countries, with crime rates and other social problems. Whereas religious practice appears to be.
And your suggestion of income inequality being significant isn’t borne out by your choice of example: Japan’s income inequality leans towards the US’, when compared to other developed countries. And yet, it’s homicide rate is totally at the other end of the spectrum. This corrolates well with the difference between the religious practice in those two countries.
I agree with others though who’ve pointed out that corrolation does not equal causation.
Why are people so quick to infer that religion is what causes crime? Even if we grant the correlation described above, one could just as easily argue that the dangers of crime make people more likely to turn to God, especially in times of hardship or crisis. Consider how the churches were flooded with people right after the 9/11 attacks, for example.
Japan has a 90% confession rate. This is proof that torture works to prevent crime, not that religion causes crime. Also, like I said, I wouldn’t necessarily trust that the data Japan releases on such statistics is necessarily true.
Which rather illustrates how hard it is to correlate countries by sheer statistics, unless you really have statistics for everything and do some serious data mining.
We had a thread in GQ a couple weeks back that was about some of the benefits of religion. A recent NYT article said: “Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.”
“Article 34 of the Japanese Constitution guarantees the right to counsel and habeas corpus, but is systematically ignored. Police and prosecutors can detain suspects for 23 days. Interrogations are relentless and sometimes abusive. Prosecutors are reluctant to bring cases to trial without a confession. Indeed, it is considered a first step in a criminal’s rehabilitation. When asked about the country’s 99% conviction rate, Japan’s justice minister, Kunio Hatoyama, corrected your correspondent to state that it was actually 99.9%, because prosecutors only present cases that are watertight.”
I can’t read their article “Confess and be done with it”, but this page’s mini-description gives a 95% confession rate.
This seems to be pretty decent evidence that torture of some sort is taking place. I doubt that asking, “What would your mother think of you?”, is as effective a method of causing confessions as Japanese TV shows depict.
I’ve also related a tale once of my trip to a Japanese jail to help translate for a British man. This man told me that when he first stepped into the jail section of the police station that he could see them beating a man, but they’d shuffled off out of sight immediately. I didn’t personally see this occur.
First of all, it would be proof of a corrolation, not causation.
But in fact, it’s not even that, because it is a solitary example. You’d have to show a similar relationship in other countries.
Then you have the fact that a high confession rate is not the same thing as a low crime rate.
And finally, by what logic would a corrolation between torture and low crime rates rule out a cause relationship between religion and crime? If living in a city is corrolated with lung cancer, that doesn’t mean cigarettes are off the hook.
But again, all the study is saying is that there appears to be a corrolation. No-one has said religion causes crime.