This is an opinion–and an exceptionally poorly supported one–not fact, and the fact is that many “rational, impartial observers” simply do disagree with your rose-colored glasses view of the 1950s.
There is no solid support for any of these assertions, except that you can indeed show that church-going numbers have been slowly falling. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with deteriorating society (unless you irrationally define it that way a priori), since it is perfectly clear that going to church does not necessarily have anything to do with whether a person is civil and polite.
As mentioned, it is difficult to see how promiscuity could cause married pregnancy. If you are alleging that the majority of married teen-agers were pregnant when they married in 1957, I would like to see a cite.
In a sense, the drastic shift from married teen pregnancy in 1957 to unmarried now is a partial explanation for the confusion. The default assumption was that pregnancy = marriage. Now it is not, and it is valid to assume in 2009 that a pregnant teen-ager is not married. Thus use of the term “teen-age pregnancy” in 2009 refers to a different phenomenon than it did fifty years ago. “Pregnant teen-ager” is a social problem now; it was not nearly so much in 1957. This is due to a number of factors - invention and widespread use of the Pill led to a loosening of social mores against illegitimacy, thus teen-agers dumb enough to have unprotected sex became more common. And the loosening also of welfare policy led to diminished consequences for the unmarried woman, and up to 80% of pregnant teens nowadays wind up on welfare.
The cite provided gives an interesting reason for the recent decline -
Also interesting is that the first time the rate dropped below 100 was shortly after welfare reform was passed by the Republican Congress.
Oh no, I understand nuance just fine. It’s just that assholes like to pile on whoever dissents from the worship of the sacred cows hereabouts.
In other words, you perfectly understand that your cite doesn’t tell the whole story. You just dishonestly posted it without caveat because you wanted to stand by Starving Artist’s side, since you know, you both share the same brand of stupid?
What’s nice is that if you google-search the phrase “a retard swinging a length of barbed wire”, there’s only one single place that phrase appears, and it was on the SDMB in regards to Starving Artist.
While it’s true that the Heritage Foundation’s website hosts these articles, they don’t (at a brief glance) appear to be works from the Heritage Foundation, but rather different studies conducted by different people.
It’s fair to suggest that the Heritage Foundation would only choose to host studies that support this viewpoint, of course, but you can’t claim that the studies themselves are flawed by the mere fact that the Heritage Foundation hosts a copy of them at their website. You have to supply other studies showing the opposite conclusion, or describe the flaws in these studies that renders them unreliable.
The genetic fallacy forms the foundation of a good third of political discourse hereabouts.
We were talking about social attitudes like being civil and polite. As the cite says, private religious practice has the greater effect on social attitudes.
And people get all bent around the axle when Starving Artist doesn’t bother with cites. Three quarters of you can’t read, and the other half can’t count.
Oh I know how to debate. And the basic rules of logical discourse, that’s how I schooled Shodan earlier. But I don’t particularly care about the particular issue.
The first cite is about a seminary, so I don’t really see how that is on point. The second is an opinion piece written by someone who obviously likes religion and wants to champion it. The third is an opinion piece. The fourth is about volunteering, which I’m not sure relates to stability of society. The fifth is about substance abuse but doesn’t mention about controlling for economic level.
In any case these are crudely scanned abstracts, not the actual data, so I don’t know what they are trying to prove. Shodan just did a quick websearch and posted rubbish hoping no-one would look at them.
Why refute rubbish when I’ve got better things to do?
I have to say it’s one of my favorite lines - I laugh every time it comes to mind, and whenever I see something from Starving Artist, it comes to mind.
Actually, what I was able to see weren’t studies. They were abstracts of papers or posters - some that didn’t even seem to be data based, and several that weren’t clearly published papers. I wasn’t able to click through to all of them - for some reason they load very slowly.
The last one has to do with religiousity and substance use, which I’m not sure is very good as a stand-in for civility and niceness.
Interestingly, the fourth (IIRC) abstract is weird - it leads by saying that there is an association between volunteerism and church attendance, but then goes on to say that there was little difference between Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainstream Protestants, and those with no religious affiliation. I don’t understand how those with no affiliation could be sampled for church attendance. The problem is that since this is an abstract of something that isn’t clearly in publication anywhere, there’s no way to evaluate its methods or claims.
It could also be that some of these were drawn from poster sessions at some unspecified convention or institutional activity, meaning that they would not have been subjected to much real scrutiny, and could be the product of a student.
