God makes society worse?
I generally try not to go on about this kind of thing on my blog, but religion is a particular bugbear of mine and this is a pretty interesting report, though I’m sure there are many holes in the argument.
Via Tom Coates I found an article at Times Online about a report that suggests Societies are worse off ‘when they have God on their side’.
Now I’m not religious as such, certainly no Christian, I don’t believe in the common view of god at all and generally feel religion and mans interpretation of it is the cause of a lot of pain and suffering the world has had to put up with. Not that the idea of religion causes that, but the way people use it to excuse ridiculous acts of ‘faith’.
So when I see this report suggesting the following:
“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.”
I find it quite interesting. As I said, I imagine some people could rip the reports apart, most statistic based things like this can be fairly inaccurate when they make certain assumptions and don’t compare like for like properly, or don’t take account of other variables. But still, when you look at what most of the trouble in the world at the moment is about, it can mostly be linked to religion, and George Bush seems perfect prey to dangle that bait in front of.
Religious fanatasicm has long been a fairly garaunteed way to get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do….