Religion Doesn’t Make People Sweet After All
Well, obviously. This is what we keep saying. No, godbothering does not always and necessarily make people better.
Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
Or at least it counters the view that religion is a guarantee of a healthy society.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills. The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports…“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.
Correlate. Correlation is not causation. But still, even the correlation is worth noticing. (Of course godbotherers still have the option of saying Yes but you see without religion, US rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion would be thousands of times higher, whereas in the other, nongodbothering prosperous democracies, with religion the rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion would be much lower. That’s the thing about correlation: that option is always available. But anyway.)
The New Republic gives us a nice glimpse of religion making people and societies better.
There was a lot of traffic, and he started to maneuver between the cars as though he were on a race track going for first place. I couldn’t keep up. My strength flagged, I stopped the car, and I cried. I saw him pulling away from me and drawing nearer to his target. His heart grew still to tear out the criminal hearts. He will be blessed, and the criminals will face hardship; he will rise, and they will fall. I saw a column of smoke rise 20 meters into the sky amid a deafening roar. He felled 50 infidels.
That’s one of the things religion does right there: make its adherents think of non-adherents as infidels. Not always, certainly, and fortunately, but the potential is always there.
Okay, sure, worshiping Sky Daddy might make us more violent and less intelligent, but at least it gives our lives meaning and purpose. If you soulless scientistic technocrats had your way, our lives might be calmer, more prosperous, and more intellectually stimulating, but it would all be so pointless and meaningless, so cold and empty, without Sky Daddy’s sometimes loving, sometimes terrifying, always mystifying tutelage. If you had ever been married to a violent man, or raised by a dangerous Dad, you’d know how exciting it can be, and never again settle for peaceful singledom or a boring marriage based on mutual kindness and respect! This is why we good God-fearing folk regularly beat the living shit outta our children–to instill in them the thrill of theism, the fear of God.
Here‘s another one of those correlations, this time regarding sucide rates among elderly people in secular and Eastern Orthodox/Roman Catholic countries.
As a long-term agnostic, I’ve gotta say this research seems a bit wobbly to me. As you say, correlation isn’t cause.
I’ll agree that religious belief doesn’t make a society, or most people, “better” in a way that the rest of us will recognise. Whether it makes them worse, I am agnostic.
I do believe, tho, that as a group agnostics are more tolerant than the religious. That is why Karl’s comments bother me. Some god-fearing folk are nutty, some are violent, most are just ordinary people with beliefs I can’t accept. But that goes for many folks’ political beliefs, too.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time living at close quarters with some hard-core Christian fundies and they DO beat the living shit outta their kids, in the apparent belief that they’re chasing out Satan (a sort of do-it-yourself exorcism). Moderate religionists aren’t quite so bad as that, but for some reason they always give the hard-core fundies a pass on almost everything (“Well, at least they believe in something!”) and reserve most of their contempt and condemnation for atheists (who are at best “pitiable” and at worst “evil”).
Still, okay, I gotta give a salute to the “devout Christian” Capt. Ian Fishback for blowing the whistle on the recent spate of US military torturing of Iraqi prisoners. I just wish there were more Fishbacks and fewer Robertsons among the faithful.
BTW, when does your “long-term” agnosticism expire?
We have met different fundies and modern religionists. Those I know behave like the rest of us in most important respects. Non-violent, non-noisy. They probably do pity me, but that’s OK. My friends who play golf, bridge and do cossword puzzles pity me too. And I pity those who don’t appreciate Bach and Dolly Parton and Dave Brubeck.
BTW, when does your “long-term” agnosticism expire?
It’s been going for about 55 years so far with no sign of fatigue.
Have to agree with Ken here. I don’t see most Christians I know as particularly obnoxious, violent, or dangerous :) Even when the one coworker goes to see “Dr.” Laura. This research seems suspect, as much as some of us might like to jump on board. There are far deeper cultural, economic, and historic roots for America’s violence and social ills.
Why should the research seem suspect? It is pure empiricism, statistical analysis — sure it’s only a correlation, but on the other hand, religion is *supposed* to make all these things better, and clearly isn’t, OB’s point about arguing round that aside…
It isn’t going to change any believers’ minds about their beliefs, but it may be useful ammunition against those who would like to hand over the attributes of a welfare state to god-botherers…
Why should the research seem suspect?
Because they compared countries, which have a lot of characterisics, and took only one – religosity to draw conclusions from. They could have just as easily said that a free press, a constitutional democracy leads to these things.
Let’s see…Africa has a high rate of HIV…most Africans are black, therefore…no, I can’t bring myself to say something so wrong, even to illustrate bad logic.
I find it hard to decide about the rigour of the research. It seems that they correlated religion with social ills and compared this correlation between countries finding it was higher in the US.
However, we don’t know anything about the techniques they used or how they controlled for confounding factors.
If it was well- controlled then it would be good evidence towards the conclusion that religion is bad for society
Ophelia: your header “Religion Doesn’t Make People Sweet After All” is not what is interesting. The question is whether it makes people sweeter than they otherwise would be. It is possible that religion does improve some people’s behaviour, but that these people would be on average more badly behaved than the rest of society without religion and that the improvement made by religion is small.
Jamie Whyte made a similar mistake in “Bad Thoughts”. From memory, he wrote of us being on a road to perfect behaviour and wondered why religious people were not closer to the destination. The mistake he made is to assume we all start from the same place.
The last comment of course implies, in this context, that Americans are all *horribly* evil, and the vileness of their society as it is would only be worse if they were as ungodly as the Swedes, who are all naturally lovely, bless ’em…
The truth is, of course, that evangelical religion is only one of a huge grab-bag of cultural traits that makes *some* Americans rather vile, and their society as a whole incapable of having a coherent view [such as Scandinavians in general have] on what the duties of a society to its members are…
Ophelia,
You should really be careful citing this study, which is actually rather full of methodological holes and doesn’t even try to do a statistical analysis. The study makes claims that the data presented don’t support. I’ve already commented extensively on this on PZ Myer’s entry on the study over at Pharyngula, so I won’t rehash them here. I’ll just point you to:
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/sinners_in_the_hands_of_an_angry_phantasm/
The bottom line, IMHO, is that this is a really poorly done study.
I really should have written my own blog entry on this, rather than contributing so much to someone else’s comments section. ;-)
“Correlation is not causation.”
A godless worldview neither assumes Original Sin, nor that all people are good and altruistic. It recognises that there’s a natural survival race going on, in which not all traits are negative. It does not even speak of any miracle cures for the ills of the earth. Religion, for all its frequent emphasis on man’s imperfections and god’s mysterious ways (well, it couldn’t just be plain sadism, could it?), does claim that it increases morality and in many cases does state that happiness and love are to be found in god, or, in one of its manifestations, in Christ. The religious do, in general, claim that religious societies are better than the others, which ought, one would think, to mean less misery. Of course correlation is not causation. But what one can’t do is point to the more religious societies and say “Look how much better the societies with more religion are doing.” And, outside of the supernatural aspect, that’s the big virtue claimed for it by its adherents and even subscribed to by many non-believers. Which leaves only the unevidenced supernatural aspect and that good old “trump card” to whatever is wrong in this world: the next one is perfect. And it’s precisely that that has been used so often as a fig leaf for letting this world be as bad as it can sometimes be. Or, in other words, not only does religion not do us any good here, its typical con-man promises of something better around the corner actually contribute to making things worse in the only world we can be sure we’re ever going to have.
“The truth is, of course, that evangelical religion is only one of a huge grab-bag of cultural traits that makes *some* Americans rather vile, and their society as a whole incapable of having a coherent view [such as Scandinavians in general have] on what the duties of a society to its members are…”
This is kinda my point: Frontier society settled largely by often marginal those unable or not allowed to “make it” in their more rigid home countries-or else those “on the make” who might be less interested in the societal niceties. Sounds like a prescription for more violence and social ills to me.
Except that we are constantly being told that religion makes people so much more moral and that atheism is a sure-fire recipe for amoralism, if not outright evil. Yet from my experience, fundamentalist religion does NOT generally improve people’s morals–the vicious remain just as vicious as they’ve always been, but now they are fortified with absolutist certitude in their own righteousness, backed up by supernatural imprimatur from the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good deity. They don’t stop beating their kids, they just feel less guilty about it now–in fact, they’re positively proud of it, they’re showing our godless society what for.
Well, Karl certainly makes a point. (Shouldn’t be “Godless Heretic Karl” by the way? :))
So: maybe the conclusion that should be made is: “religion doesn’t help.”
But, is he correct in making the leap that “religion makes things worse”? My favorite line is “Evil people do evil things. It takes religion to make good people do evil things.” Is this true? Does this study REALLY confirm or even indicate this? Is this true of your experience? Keep in mind that even “good” people can copmmit crimes of passion, be prejudiced, do bad things.
We probably don’t want to get too far into theology, but many Protestants would not claim that belief makes people better, in the sense we are talking about.
Members of sects derived from the Calvinist line – such as the evangelical Episcopalians/Anglicans- believe in “Justification by Faith” which means that you go to heaven if you believe, no matter what you have done. They say that good worth are pleasing to god, but won’t get you to heaven. They tend to cut back on social welfare work done by their churches for this reason.
So far as I know, such people are not evil (any more than the rest of us) except perhaps in the way they move to remove music from the church.
For me, the only remaining value in religious practice is the music.
“Some musicians believe in God. All musicians believe in Bach”
But then, you lot probably don’t like music either….
ken, please tell me that’s a joke. About the music.
By golly, ken’s right, Ophelia. I used to love music (especially Bach) back in the days when I trembled in fear of Sky Daddy’s retribution. But now that I no longer believe in Him, I have grown allergic to all things bright and beautiful: music, art, poetry–these useless, stupid things just bore me to tears and move me–if at all–only to envious spite. Ever since my scientistic awakening, I just sit about the house all day smoking opium, masturbating to goat porn, and putting razor-blades in Halloween apples. These are the only employments that fill the howling void in my non-existent soul.
Ophelia: Which bit? The last comment or the one about the evangelicals dismantling music? The latter is true. “Music has no part in worship, which sholud concentrate on bible study”. Funnily enough, here this group is attracting a lot of university students and such who seem to like the analytical approach to bible study.
The happy-clappers are a different sect, but then, their music isn’t very good.
I must make it clear that I am an observer of all this, not a participant. I just wish us atheists and agnostics had produced good music.
Gee, (if you don’t mind the expression) you are getting senstive, Karl.
My final comment in the second last post was by way of an apology to those who aren’t interested in music for using it as an example.
I sometimes receive blank stares when I suggest that Bach in particular made one of the greatest contributions of any person ever to human joy. So I sometimes hedge my bets.
[blank godless stare]
Re. Ken on faith. Ca;vinism may have changed since its early days, but I was under the impression they believed in election — which is to say, some are saved already and only God knows who. This is the root of the infamous salvation anxiety to which Weber attributes the ‘spirit of capitalism’, viz. gotta work hard and prove to myself I’m good, daren’t spend any of the money on nice things ‘cos that would be sinful, better reinvest for growth….
Justification by faith was the Lutherans, who might be seen as using it as an excuse to get out of the good works required by Catholicism. Or not.
Dave – you have just overtaken my knowledge of Protestant theology.
I think tho that most of them would find it hard to argue that they behave better because they are Christians. Which was where this wierd discussion started.
Paul- i dont really think it is a mistake by jamie whyte. he was talking about equivocation on the word christian. the word has two meanings, somebody who has various beliefs about god and jesus, and, simply good. in the second sense it is hardly surprising that all christians are good. it often seems to be infered that those who believe in jesus must be good, brilliant! and no need for evidence! christians often slip between the two meanings. he did not speculate about how good christians actually are.
I hear nothing from Christians about how good they are; rather, I hear how they gave up crime and hate, and are not themselves sufficiently good to condemn others. I hear a lot more on this from people-who-criticise-christians, making a great play on their projected christian hypocrisy.
The wordeplay argument above is pretty pathetic. I merely say that on the face of it, whatever the study design, its results appear to be presented to cater for prejudice.
So, are people better off in religious societies or under atheists…like Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Stalin?
Ask the victims of The Inquisition, the 100 Years War, the Aztecs and Incas and Mayans killed by evangelizing Spaniards (or, for that matter, the thousands of human hearts sacrificed by the Aztecs to keep the universe going), the infidels killed by the Taliban the same question.
My point: there are plenty of deaths attributable to religious wars.
“So, are people better off in religious societies or under [militant] atheists…like Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Stalin?”
They’re better off under liberal democratic governments & secular societies like those of postwar Western Europe.
They’re better off under liberal democratic governments & secular societies like those of postwar Western Europe.
Hey, Karl, we agree!
Probably a good point to close the topic (for me anyway).
Well, we also agree on Bach. He kicks ass.
Bach would be mighty offended by the very conception of him “kicking ass.”
Clueless Literalist Brian :)
You obviously never saw Bruiser Bach and Brutalicious Beethoven in that tag-team match when they pile-drived those weak-ass pussies Telemann and Hummel and made ’em cry for their mamas.
I’ll settle for ‘kick’s ass” tho I don’t know how that come out in 18th Century German.
One question: Bach wrote most his stuff as a salaried employee of the Lutheran church. The cantatas were written each week – a bit like a columnist cranking out a weekly column (how many columns will still be read in 250 years?)
No, that’s not the question. If Bach had been employed by, say, the circus to write music for each week’s show, would it have been so wonderful? Or did it need his religious belief – which in the case on the Lutheranism of the time, included the belief that life was pretty shitty and the only thing worth looking forward to is death. The happy cantatas are all about death.
So, how in hell did this produce what many of us think is the greatest bundle of music ever written?
“So, how in hell did this produce what many of us think is the greatest bundle of music ever written?”
Cuz Bach was a towering genius of awesome proportions.
“If Bach had been employed by, say, the circus to write music for each week’s show, would it have been so wonderful?”
Probably. And by the way, not all of his cantatas are great. Many of them are fairly routine stuff. We only remember the good ones. Also, the Christmas Oratorio is a real snoozer. (The only thing that dreary piece of musical boilerplate “inspires” me to do is shoot up some crystal meth to keep from dozing off.) And don’t forget all that awe-inspiring secular instrumental music he wrote for the super-Calvinistic (expialidocious) Prince Leopold, who considered religious music a sin. Put that in your little corncob pipe and smoke it, ken. It’ll go well with your coffee cantata.
“I hear nothing from Christians about how good they are; rather, I hear how they gave up crime and hate, and are not themselves sufficiently good to condemn others.”
To take ChrisPer seriously for the first and last time in my life, I’d say that the “decent, tolerant” Christians I have known were always the intelligent people who had turned to non-fundamentalist Christianity after many years of sheer hell (broken homes, drug addiction, prostitution, etc.). It seemed to be an emotional crutch for them; but since they were decent (albeit very damaged) people who seriously believed they needed their faith to survive, and they weren’t shoving their beliefs down my throat, I did not mock them. But such people were the minority. The less-intelligent people who grew up in a fundie faith and never had much experience of the outside world were always smug, vicious, and invincibly self-righteous. Spending a long time living among such mean, narrow people made me deeply suspicious of the supposed benefits of faith in general, and especially wary of the most vociferous members of The Faithful.
The main exceptions to this rule are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, although they profess a ridiculous fundamentalist theology, are at least relatively benign–they’re pacifist, non-political, and staunch believers in the separation of church and state. They also don’t seem to beat their kids as much. The rest of the fundies, though, get short shrift from me.
walking through the national gallery i often got the feeling that the overall effect would be rather better if there were not quite so many mary’s and baby jesuses, and adult jesuses for that matter. the effect may be worse if all the work was commissioned by the priests of flying spaggetti monsterfarianism (he looks like a mop) but i’d plum for letting them make up their own mind.
Actually, most of the “committed Christians” I have met seem to be high on drugs. They have huge smiles on their faces all the time. It’s quite disturbing….
“Actually, most of the “committed Christians” I have met seem to be high on drugs.”
They may well have been. Some of the biggest druggies I’ve known have been Christers. These people would consume heroic quantities of acid and speed, so when they said they heard God talking to them, I’m sure they meant it literally. By the way, Ashley Smith, the “Unlikely Angel” in Atlanta who became a hero among the Religious Right for “converting” that fugitive who held her hostage…turns out she was feeding the guy crystal meth from her own private stash. The Lord sure does work in mysterious ways!
One of the biggest Christian fundies I ever met was some obnoxious high-school bully who loved to shove Jesus in your face every chance he got (he also liked to pick on “Jew boys”). Shortly after graduation he went on a crime spree that ended in a murder. The victim was a 73-year-old woman who lived down the street from me. Fundie boy raped her, she broke free, he chased her around for 45 minutes, smashing her skull in with a variety of objects (telephone, flower pot, patio brick), leaving quite a mess behind–there was blood all over the house and in the yard. He did three years, rediscovered Jesus all over again in prison, and got paroled. Last I heard, about five years ago, he shot a cop. I’m sure Jesus loves him, though.
“flying spaggetti monsterfarianism”
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, boy is my face red.
From the sauce?
Actually, monsterfarianism is an improvement.
People are either happy or sad based on their personalities much of which is established at birth.
Whether one is theist or theist or whatever brand one chooses doesn’t seem to affect this much.
mildly off-topic: this link was on the JREF’s latest Commentary; I thought some B&Wers might find it amusing
http://90percenttrue.com/index.php?p=41
“The main exceptions to this rule are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, although they profess a ridiculous fundamentalist theology, are at least relatively benign–they’re pacifist, non-political, and staunch believers in the separation of church and state. They also don’t seem to beat their kids as much. The rest of the fundies, though, get short shrift from me.”
Google the link between JW and pedophilia. Not such a happy, sweet cult after all. :(
So, the JWs are going all Catholic on us, eh?
Suffer the little children? No shit.
The wordeplay [sic] argument above is pretty pathetic.
– ChrisPer
It is not nearly so pathetic as this so-called argument:
The fact is that in a disaster, shit happens big-time and everyone gets bent out of shape over it – that’s why its a disaster. Ever fought bushfires guys? Ever been in a flood? Some basic advice. Grow up. Get over it. Look what happened in the state next door, worse hit but not in the news – because THEIR tgovernment did their job. What I see here is the media self-righteously getting in the way of the people who have to clean up, by destroying their credibility. And as for the Oprah-fied whiny ‘victims’ all over the news, where are the heroes who are getting on with coping, looking after their own and so on? Those role models are NEEDED. The media could be a constructive force, but instead it is an echo chamber of whining bush-hating democrat absurdity, destroying instead of building its host society….
– ChrisPer | 2005-09-07 – 04:00:44 |
Why, Brian U., that’s just ChrisPer demonstrating some of that Christian charity we’re always hearing about!
(Goddamn pussy “victims” always expecting a handout. Suck it up, maggots! Boo-yah!)