I will just toss this news report into the ring Times, to see if dopers agree or disagree with the findings of the Journal of Religion and Society and its report on religious beliefs and the way it affects the USA.
It all seems straightforward to me. The US is very religious. The US is a mess in many respects, compared to most European democracies. Surprise, surprise. Religion a bad thing after all. Who’d a thunk it?
Only two remarks unless and until the report itself becomes available -
[ul][li]Some one ought to explain the difference between correlation and causality to Mr. Paul, and A report that refers to the US as a “developing” democracy, or makes remarks like [/li][quote]
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution.
[/quote]
does not suggest a rigorous approach was taken to the subject. [/ul]Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is something about religious belief in general, which is what the report allegedly argues, that causes higher rates of murder and gonorrhea.
But it might be interesting to find out why the author of this study believes that religious faith in the US is responsible for all the bad differences[sup]*[/sup], but is not involved in any of the good differences.
Regards,
Shodan
[sup]*[/sup]I wonder how accurate, for instance, the allegation is that adolescent gonorrhea rates in the US are 300 times higher than other countries.
One of my statistics professors once showed the class a graph showing a supposed correlation between murder rate and the rate church membership in various cities.
He wasn’t trying to slam religion – he was trying to illustrate that correlation doesn’t in general imply causation.
In response to which, I speculated that maybe there is causation but it’s the other way around: a community with more problems is more likely to look to religion?
I’m not sure that’s true either, but I’d say it’s more likely than religion causing the problems.
What Shodan said. This isn’t convincing on its own. Also, let me voice my irritation at the following statement in the article:
Support for evolution = “Darwinism?” Grrr. Apparently, the I.D.ots are winning in Britain.
I see a number of things suspect about the report. For one, Paul does not explain why he has selected religion from among the numerous differences between the US and Europe as apropos of anything at all. Why not choose, say, the difference in governments? Paul lumps the US in with Europe as “democracies”, but neglects to point out that the US is uniquely federalist, while Europe is parliamentary. Maybe the frustration of dealing with one man who is both head of government and head of state creates a murderous and licentious anxiety, causing all the alleged havoc. It seems to me that if he is going to consider religion as the only difference, then he should be put upon to explain the low crime rate of the Holy See. The Vatacan is practically unanimously religious, so why is there not rioting and murderous mayhem in the streets of central Rome?
For another, he has arbitrarily created a dichotomy between religion and evolution. If he were to visit Great Debates, there would be no time at all before several people enjoined him to explain that a person can (and many people do) believe in both a creator and evolution. Again, where has he established a correlation at all between belief in a creator and the tendency to commit murder or contract syphilis? Perhaps the correlation (if indeed there is any correlation at all) is between rates of poverty or one of a bazillion factors in which the US differs from Europe.
In fact, it can be argued that religion in the US is on the decline, and so we should be seeing a marked decrease in sexually transmitted disease and head smashing. Maybe the culprit is lax gun control. Maybe it’s noncontiguous geography. Maybe it’s the proximity to Mexico. Or Canada. Or Cuba. Europe isn’t close to any of those. And then again, not having seen either the data he examined or the metadata he produced, maybe he just has the whole thing wrong.
One point of interest was the fact that he withheld release of his report on account of Hurricane Katrina. I thought that was an odd thing for the article to mention more or less out of the blue, and without explaining why. Ought we to conclude, in the same cum hoc ergo propter hoc style of George Paul, that the release of European reports is contingent on weather patterns in the Gulf of Mexico?
Rather then claim the author doesn’t understand causation, how about critiquing the actual article? Linky.
Disclaimer: While I support the findings of the article, I have not tried to debate this subject since I first came here, and I would like to read and consider the article before I do so again.
I have not yet had time to read it, but rather than discussing some newspaper’s condensation of the article, I suggest reading the actual article:
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.
Paul never claims causality, only correlation, so that’s a strawman objection. The most he says is that religion “might contribute to social ills.” But he makes no assertion that such has been proven.
It seems to me that the slant of the story is not so much to prove that religious cultures are bad, but to show that secular culture is NOT. It’s a rebuttal to those who would claim that religion is necessary to make a country function. Paul does not claim that “America is bad because it’s religious,” he’s claiming that more secular countries seem to have significantly fewer social problems so it can’t be said that a lack of religion hurts society. THAT is the point of the story. Read with comprehension, people, don’t just jerk the old knee.
By the way, while the author draws a false division between evolution and theism, it IS true that most Americans do not accept evolution and that is a huge problem all by itself. It should be a no-brainer to understand that the more a culture begins to reject science in favor of superstition and magic, the worse off it will be. In that same vein, it should also be no surprise that pushing moralistic “abstinence only” BS on kids instead of educating them about human sexuality and how to protect themselves is going to lead to elevated rates of teen pregnancy, STDs and abortion.
The same problems remain. Paul argues, for example, from the premise that there is a “widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster” (Section 19). He apparently derived this premise from the fact that “a strong majority from conservative to liberal [believe] that religion is beneficial for society and for individuals”. (Section 8). But it is a far cry from arguing that something is beneficial to arguing that its absence is a disaster. I don’t mind saying that I would greatly benefit from a high definition television in my basement, but I’m not quivering in fear that my household will fall apart.
Paul applies some rather slippery interpretations to some of the data he has reviewed. For example, he concludes from Colson and Pearcey (and others) that “many conservative theists consider evolutionary science a leading contributor to social dysfunction”. (Section 5). Well, that’s true. Partly. But as the National Center for Science Education points out, the data already contradicted the conclusions of Colson and Pearcey before they even published. Violent crime rates were in a steady decline over a long period of time during an administration that they considered to be immoral. Paul’s failure to note those sorts of discrepancies smacks of a disingenuous deliberation to make the facts fit his hypothesis. In other words, not only does a handful of conservative fundamentalists not constitute a “widely held” belief, but the belief has already been proven false, and the fact that it is false contradicts his own findings of rampant crime.
Another problem is still the mischaracterization of the problem as a whole. A careless reader might conclude from Paul’s report that finding an evolutionist in the US is akin to finding a Chevy Impala in Tokyo. In fact, more people in the US believe in evolution than don’t — 49% to 40%. And of those, it’s the uneducated, the poor, and the politically disempowered (especially Blacks and Women) who mostly are creationists. Paul ties creationism to high crime by citing regional correlations in the South and Midwest while ignoring the more obvious factors of poverty and race and class struggle. 53% of women are creationists, but do more women than men commit crimes? This is once again an indictment of his choices for what correlates to what. Why not say that warm weather causes high crime?
Paul at least calls for “more extensive research on the subject”, and says that understanding the problem he is looking at “requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism” — something he himself has not done. (Section 20).
Perhaps the title of the OP should be amended, since it makes an allegation about the report which is incorrect.
From the report (thanks for the link, tomndebb) -
It also might be the case that he is selecting his test cases a little more carefully than is warranted.
The USSR was officially atheist for many years. One wonders why that didn’t solve their problems with, say, alcoholism, or their extremely high abortion rates.
Add to that the unfortunate tendency of the author to conflate creationism specifically with religious belief in general, and the level of confidence in the report sinks further.
Junk science in furtherance of an agenda. Who’d a thunk.
Regards,
Shodan
:dubious: Have you not noticed that “School kids/music/people are corrupt nowadays because of a lack of JESUS in their hearts.” is a default arguement?
The opposite is a default argument as well. What point are you making?
Please restate the first part of your post, or I will beforced to conclude that
" means just what it sounds like.
The only way I could restate it is to say that “X is a disaster because Y is absent” does not follow from “X would benefit from Y”.
Ah, it sounded an awful lot like you were saying that "Oh, while a lot of people say “religion is good.”, that doesn’t mean that people actually ever say “Lack of religion is bad”. :dubious:
Anyway, I am sure you need to read post 9 again.
The study definitely shows that there is no demonstrable advantage to religion in a culture as well as that the lack thereof will not doom it.
Comparisons to communist atheism as examples of “secular cultures” are specious, since communism itself filled the same social role as religion, since the atheism was forced rather than voluntary (and was in large part insincere) and since those societies contained far worse pressures than a lack of (public) belief in gods.
The headline here is basically that religion cannot be shown to be necessary in order for a country to function successfully.
Actually, I agree with Diogenes. Maybe you should read my last paragraph again in post 10.
What gave you the impression we were talking about what people say?
Regards,
Shodan
Maybe so, but then Paul’s entire comparison of religious versus non-religious is equally specious, since lots of things — like poverty, for example — fill the social roles of high crime regions.