NEWS: Religion Contributes to Society's Ills

I think religious fundamentalism is less of a cause of human misery and more of just another symptom. When everything goes to Hell, you look for someone to blame. You could blame yourself, but that's so unpleasant. Why not blame the devil? Or your neighbor, for not being pious enough? When chaos is the dominant state of your life, you try to find something absolute.



[Edited on Sep 27, 2005 by Keith]

A fair number of scholars would contend that the Crusades were actually expansionist wars fought for land to pacify excess feudal vassals and noble offspring and that the religious aspect of the Crusades was tacked on a bit after the fact as a rationale (see, for example, Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process). So, damn religion for making it easier to market, rather than start, wars! Grrrr!

It's also no coincidence that religious fundamentalism is usually almost inversely proportional to one's level of education. So if you have a poorly educated society, you have more religious fundamentalists, but also more crime, divorce, poverty, etc.

Its not God, its his followers.

The United States is a statistical outlier on almost every measurable outcome. I could say countries where English is spoken in most homes have higher crime rates, or countries where a high percentage of people attend college have higher murder rates, or countries that don't like professional soccer have higher rates of STDs. However, once you exclude the US, these correlations would likely disappear. The US is an EXTREME outlier and messes up statistics. Additionally, just because two things are correlated does not mean one causes the other. Ice cream consumption and drownings are highly correlated at Mission Beach in San Diego, CA. Eating ice cream increases the risk of drowning??? No. People eat ice cream and drown in the summer. Highly correlated, but completely unrelated in any direct way. As to asking WHY two things are related ... the author provides no proof whatsoever as to WHY religiousity may be related to social ills. Why two things are correlated is almost always mere conjecture. That's why we have social theory. Grrr. I can't believe I'm so worked up over this. Does this mean I'm becoming a sociologist GEEK???? Dammit.

To some extent, this is like saying a person's belief in Judaism is inversely proportional to her reverence for the Pope. Fundamentalists are strong believers in home schooling and lobby against mandatory enrollment. Home schoolers (mostly fundamentalist) are a major obstacle to Universal Pre-Kindergarten in this country. Many fundamentalists see public education as liberal brainwashing. Besides, what do women need to learn past 10th grade anyway? Am I right?

The US, as Thee Democracy, making us the ultimate expression of liberty cannot be anything ever but the median of all statistics. As dictated by statistical probability of our inherant complete freedom for, oh what is it now, over 200 years all such interpretation leads to the perfect bell curve of results. Therefore we are not the so called "outlier." We are NORMAL. All other countries are outliers and should be brought into line by miltary means as quickly as possible. Anybody believing the US to be a so-called "outlier" is obviously anti-american. If your countries religions don't contribute to the ills of society then they are obviously not as effective as the religions of the good old U.S. of A.

I'm half asleep so I didn't read the study itself, but I searched it for some key words, and read the news article too. I'm fairly confident in saying:

Correlation is not causation!

Two shay, my friend. Two shay.

Agreed, but I hope that response is ironic as well.
"Two shay?"

I hadn't heard that before, but I like it.

Nonono...

Why is God such an asshole?

Yeah it's a good thing to remember whenever news articles include phrases like:

"...was killed by a 35 year old man addicted to violent pornography..."

or

"...the fundamentalist muslim..."

No. Wars are nearly always fought over resources, whether that means territory (and thus mineral resources) or trade routes . Religion, political ideology, pre-emptive aggression or even "stupid tribal/ethnic stuff" - these are all used to sell the idea to those who are gonna have to do the fighting, or send their kids to do the fighting, whilst the ones who will benefit from the resources sit behind the lines sipping tea, or budweiser more commonly these days.

Exactly. Ask a man to fight for you so that you can expand your land and wealth and he'll likely tell you to piss off. Tell a man to go to war with you because "God wills it", and he's more than willing to enlist.

Religion mainly contributes to endless irritating, worthless threads. How do you mean, you find it illogical? Share this insight! Surely you have no proofs? You do?