Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Times Online reports of Science's latest lubeless buttfucking of Religion

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

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.

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. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

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: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“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.”

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.

He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.

“The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.

“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

Now this is a giant kick in the balls of fundamentalism. GG Science!

[General Zod]

Now this is a giant kick in the balls of fundamentalism. GG Science!

Not really. The fundies will either continue to ignore it, dismiss it as propaganda or claim that secularists are out to persecute them with slander and lies.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Now this is a giant kick in the balls of fundamentalism. GG Science!

Not really. The fundies will either continue to ignore it, dismiss it as propaganda or claim that secularists are out to persecute them with slander and lies.

Point. Any other memetic virus would be expected to take up defense or attack options; why not fundamentalism?

[Wicked Pilot]

Similiar (maybe even the same) study posted quite a while ago

[CJvR]

Well if God could be scientificly proven then it would hardly be religion anymore would it? Then you would "belive" in God like you belive in gravity.

[Covenant]

Well if God could be scientificly proven then it would hardly be religion anymore would it? Then you would "belive" in God like you belive in gravity.

Don't be daft. Religions were conducted as if they were fact for quite some time, where literal word was handed down and specific, highly calculated rites were conducted. The idea that a religion requires 'faith' in the invisible hand of your creator is an absurd modern-day spin on the fact that all these things that used to demonstrate a God's will are now known to have mundane causes. If God were proven existant then the debate would be over and you'd go back to observing the rites, following the rituals, and burning things on altars again the way they used to do--on a strict timetable. The fact that people today belive in a small and personal God who cares more about them than all the smelly temples and incense and wars he used to so adore back when the original Biography of the big G was written doesn't mean those things never happened.

[Rye]

Ah, September 27, 2005. Awesome.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Oh yeah, this is Gregory S. Paul's thing. Older than dirt, but maybe if someone were to shunt this off to SLAM, we could get some use out of it - I've seen this paper come under fire before, and someone with more time than me could maybe get good exercise out of taking his critics to task:

Anti-GS Paul blog

In a recent article in The Journal of Religion and Society, Gregory S. Paul posits a proposition:

Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.

Translation: Religion is bad for your health.

More specifically, Mr. Paul indicates that democratic societies predominantly holding to a belief in God (read: the United States) are socially unhealthy, but democratic societies that are secular and embrace evolution (read: the majority of Western European countries) are on their way to utopia.

So who is Gregory S. Paul and what are his qualifications to opine on the salubrious quality of agnosticism? We spent a considerable amount of time attempting to discover where Mr. (Dr.?) Paul received his training in sociology and/or statistical analysis, etc. Here’s what we found:
.
.
.
.
The above blank space is not a formatting error of some kind. It is the best we could come up with to signify nada, zero, zip, bupkis, nihilo,…nothing. Yes, that’s right. We found nothing. As near as we can tell, Mr. Paul has no advanced degrees in statistical analysis, demography, sociology, or any other “ology.” In fact, it appears as though he holds no advanced degrees of any kind. He is, in fact, an artist and “freelance paleontologist” who has published two books in the area of dinosaur studies that “re-imagine” how they may have lived and operated on this planet. And to be fair, Mr. Paul seems to be respected for this work.

He also contributed to a book co-written with Earl Cox titled Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds. This volume appears to be one in a long line of books purporting to look into the future of humanity and its inevitable co-evolution with technology. Amazon has many reviews of this work, at least one of which is pertinent to the present discussion:

Paul and Cox are more on target in their discussion of the perverse backwardness of traditional religious worldviews in response to current and foreseeable progress. Christians should realize that something is wrong with their story when virgins can now routinely give birth via modern reproductive medicine, and soon without even genetic contributions from men.

This theme is echoed in the current journal article – an antagonism towards religious faith and a skepticism of things supernatural. Mr. Paul has been banging this drum since 1996 and has simply found a new outlet with this study.

Looking further, we found Gregory S. Paul listed as a featured speaker for The Council for Secular Humanism, an organization cultivating “rational inquiry, ethical values, and human development through the advancement of secular humanism.” Mr. Paul is recommended as a speaker who:

is an excellent candidate to counter young-earth creationists. His book, “Beyond Humanity,”…further equips him to speak on the role of religion in society. Because of his scientific background, Paul is also able to speak on broad debate issues, such as evolution v. creationism and the like.

So again, Mr. Paul seems to have an agenda that has been around long before this “study” appeared in The Journal of Religion and Society. Indeed, his list of publications reads like a satire of a student atheist one might find on The Wittenberg Door. He has a two-parter in Free Inquiry magazine titled, “The Great Scandal: Christianity in the Rise of the Nazis.” The article is about what one would expect based on the title, but we’ll leave that for another day.

What about the study itself? Does it hold water? Admittedly, we here at Verum Serum are not statisticians (neither, it appears, is Mr. Paul). For educated criticism of Mr. Paul’s statistical work we refer you to Scott Gilbreath, who runs the Magic Statistics blog. Scott is a statistician by trade and has done a masterful job of critiquing Mr. Paul’s work. His conclusion:

In my professional judgment, the statistical and scientific validity of Mr. Paul’s study…can not be accepted.

But wait! There’s more! Here’s the conclusion of the George H. Gallup International Institute (Gallup has been known to work with numbers on occasion) as stated in a letter from George Gallup to the London Times where Mr. Paul’s study was highlighted by a gullible reporter.

Gregory Paul’s conclusion is based on a flawed analysis according to my research associate, D Michael Lindsay, an expert in the department of sociology at Princeton University. After carefully examining Paul’s international study, Mr. Lindsay maintains that it does not pass scholarly muster.

In short, Gregory S. Paul is qualified to draw dinosaurs. He is NOT qualified to draw conclusions about the effects of religion on society. However, given that Mr. Paul is not an expert and that his study is not scholarly, our own non-scholarly response would seem appropriate and sufficient to the task of dismantling it.

The first thing that bothered us was Mr. Paul’s peculiar selectivity. If the intent is to compare societies where faith is common to societies where faith is not, why were some countries included and others excluded. Scott at Magic Statistics noticed the same thing:

The plan of the study is to gather and compare data for countries he refers to variously as “prosperous developed democracies” and “developing democracies”…India would seem to fit in with “developing democracies”. Why was it excluded? Not “prosperous” enough? Don’t know: Mr. Paul doesn’t say. Why were Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, and the rest of the new eastern European democracies excluded?

We believe we can answer this question, at least in part. Based on Interpol data for the Russian Federation (year 2000), the murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 21.87, or approximately 3 times the rate in the U.S. Since we all know the Russian Federation (i.e. the USSR) was officially atheist for 75 years, this would seem to significantly undercut Mr. Paul’s thesis that religion is bad for your health.

There is a broader issue regarding the selection of murder as the chief criteria for his study. Mr. Paul justifies this choice as a practical one. In his words,

"Homicide is the best indicator of societal violence because of the extremity of the act and its unique contribution to levels of societal fear, plus the relatively reliable nature of the data."

But as we looked into homicide statistics, we discovered that it is a frequently remarked upon fact that the murder rate in the US is unusually high compared to other categories of crime. FBI statistics demonstrate that the unusually high murder rate is almost entirely the result of gang and drug-related homicides in major cities, as the chart below illustrates.



This is not to excuse the fact that the murder rate in the US is higher than in many European countries (though as noted far lower than in the former USSR). This fact is commonly used by gun control advocates to make a case for stricter, more European, gun laws. However, at some point one needs to ask how inner city drug shootings relate to religious faith in any real world sense. We understand that “establishing causation” is not Mr. Paul’s goal, but a little common sense can’t hurt. Are drug lords and roving gangs of thugs spending a great deal of time in church? Or does the very nature of drug and gang-related crime, from which these murder statistics arise, seem rather to provide a case study in the Darwinian principle of “survival of the fittest?”

In any case, we suspect Mr. Paul chose to highlight murder because it is an outlying statistic that would therefore tend to prove his thesis. But as Mr. Paul’s own study demonstrates (with regard to suicide), there are numerous other indicators of societal health in which the United States appears to be comparable to European nations.

To further demonstrate the point, we’ve put together the following charts from Interpol data:



Notice that the US ranks lower than many far more secular countries like Sweden and the Netherlands.



In addition we found another recent publication called The International Crime Victim’s Survey which provides a similar view of relative international crime rates. We reproduce just a couple of the many graphs included in this study below:







So it appears to us that Mr. Paul has selected data, both in terms of countries considered and specific crimes looked at, in such a way as to paint the picture that was already on his mind. As demonstrated above, a broader look at available data presents a far more nuanced picture.

But as we alluded to previously, we needn’t speculate about whether Mr. Paul’s data followed or preceded his conclusions. As it happens, Mr. Paul presented the same conclusions — sans statistical sleight of hand — in a June 2002 article in Free Inquiry magazine titled “The Secular Revolution of the West: It’s Passed America by–so far”:

Americans believe ardently in part because they have been warned–sometimes subtly, often stridently–by their theological and political leaders that society must adhere to faith-based values or suffer dire social and moral consequences. This claim is demonstrably false. The highly religious United States suffers from markedly higher rates of homicide, in carceration [sic], juvenile and adult mortality, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, abortion, and other social dys-functions [sic] than developed democracies where creator belief is much lower. [Note our update below for more on this]

Sound familiar? This sentiment is echoed in his book “Beyond Humanity,” as well as in his previously mentioned piece “The Great Scandal: Christianity in the Rise of the Nazis.” In the same piece quoted above, Mr. Paul makes plain what the problem is as well as what he believes is the solution:

Basically, we face an education problem: better informing Americans about the proven advantages of rationally based moral and social values may be necessary to speed up modernizing America into a normal, secularized developed democracy.

In the mind of Gregory S. Paul, nothing good can come out of Christianity and religious faith. He has believed this for many years and has done his best to make his ideas available for public consumption. In this regard, bloggers who contacted The Journal of Religion and Society where Mr. Paul’s opus was published learned that the original draft made even greater claims for the data and had to be toned down.

We can’t fault him for his desire to share his ideas, that is after all the reason we blog and the essence of the blogoshpere, but we think it’s important to point when something is a conclusion based on scientific principles and methodologies and when it is part of a campaign (he would dislike the term crusade). Mr. Paul is a gifted illustrator but he is not a sociologist. His study is not a dispassionate product of science but an ugly exercise in anti-theist propaganda.

Update 12/16: Mr. Paul’s 2002 statement about the social results of theism, quoted in full above, cite as their source an earlier Free Inquiry piece by George Bishop, a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. At the time we wrote this post, we did not have a copy of Mr. Bishop’s piece. However, having recently aquired a copy, we can now add that Mr. Bishop’s piece has absolutely nothing to do with the social health of nations vis a vis theism. Mr. Bishop’s piece is about international rates of atheism and does not even use the words murder, suicide or abortion, much less assert that they vary based on rates of belief. Mr. Paul’s 2002 claims were a bald assertion backed up by a fraudulent citation.

[fgalkin]

News my arse.

Moved.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Wicked Pilot]

Well if God could be scientifically proven then it would hardly be religion anymore would it? Then you would "believe" in God like you believe in gravity.

According to the Bible God proved himself to the Hebrews during the Exodus, and yet they still en mass build a golden calf to worship.

In the end there's a lot of variables in your what if scenario such as how 'proven' is this god, how much do we know about him/her, including which religion got it the most accurate? Evolution is 'proven' as much as anything can be 'proven' in a scientific sense, yet not everyone accepts it.

[Wicked Pilot]

About the critique:

Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.

Translation: Religion is bad for your health.

No, the conclusion made was that the claim of religion being necessary to societal health is unfounded.

So who is Gregory S. Paul and what are his qualifications to opine on the salubrious quality of agnosticism? We spent a considerable amount of time attempting to discover where Mr. (Dr.?) Paul received his training in sociology and/or statistical analysis, etc. ... We found nothing.

Admittedly, we here at Verum Serum are not statisticians

Glad we cleared this up.

The first thing that bothered us was Mr. Paul’s peculiar selectivity. If the intent is to compare societies where faith is common to societies where faith is not, why were some countries included and others excluded.

Isolating other variables. The prosperous democracies are the most like us and therefore the best to build a comparison.



Trying to explain away homicide rates in the U.S.:

Are drug lords and roving gangs of thugs spending a great deal of time in church?

The vast majority of them come from a religious upbringing. And the number of atheist are underrepresented in U.S. prisons.


As far as theft, burglary, and assault goes, the date presented still proves the original point. If religion had such a positive impact we wouldn't be middle of the road, but instead we'd have the lowest trends. Beyond that no attempt is made to counter the data on suicide, abortions, teen pregnancy, STDs, and adult and juvenile mortality. They didn't even try.

[Duckie]

Well if God could be scientifically proven then it would hardly be religion anymore would it? Then you would "believe" in God like you believe in gravity.

According to the Bible God proved himself to the Hebrews during the Exodus, and yet they still en mass build a golden calf to worship.

In the end there's a lot of variables in your what if scenario such as how 'proven' is this god, how much do we know about him/her, including which religion got it the most accurate? Evolution is 'proven' as much as anything can be 'proven' in a scientific sense, yet not everyone accepts it.

Well, one could make the case that a god who appears to you is powerful, but that he still isn't the all powerful creator of the universe and that said nonproven God deserves your worship, or that this God is not the only existing god and that the existance of other gods which deserve worship is proven by the proof of this one.

There's numerous ways to not worship a god who establishes their presence even with miracles.

[Wicked Pilot]

I don't remember the exact quote, or who it's attributed to, but when someone was asked if they died and appeared before God would they worship him?

"That depends on the apology he gives"

[bobalot]

Some of those figures for Australia look a bit bullshit.

Link

This table shows America is more violent. And the source they use is a United Nations survey. Admittedly these figures look a bit out of date.

[K. A. Pital]

I stopped reading the "critique" here:

We believe we can answer this question, at least in part. Based on Interpol data for the Russian Federation (year 2000), the murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 21.87, or approximately 3 times the rate in the U.S. Since we all know the Russian Federation (i.e. the USSR) was officially atheist for 75 years, this would seem to significantly undercut Mr. Paul’s thesis that religion is bad for your health.

What the bloody fuck? Comparing the US and "Russian Federation" - an economically stricken second world nation? What an asshole. How about he did a real comparison of adjacent territories, like the atheist USSR and nearby heavily religious Central Asian nations with Islam rampant? But I guess that would be beyond his purpose of "critique".

Funnily enough, simultaneously with the rising crime in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s, RUssia underwent a "religious revival" where more and more people became religious (and bandits were some of the most religious people in Russia, actually - a lot of the gangster culture in Russia is heavily mixed in religion). But the trend should've been opposite, right?

Why were Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, and the rest of the new eastern European democracies excluded?

Because someone needs to shove his head out of his ass and get the difference between the First World and Second World, as well as that and the Third World.

[K. A. Pital]

To elaborate a little about the idiot's rant about Russia:

During the whole period of the 1990s the rise in the number of churches, monasteries and church schools, as well as eparchies, continued from the trend that started in the late 1980s.

During the Sobor of 1990, the Russian Orthodox Church had 92 archierei. According to the Moscow Patriarchy report on the modern history of the Russian Orthdox Church, in 1989 the church had 9734 congregations (churches), 35 monasteries, 8100 priests and diakons.

According to the report of Patriarch Alexiy in June 2008, the ROC had 156 eparchies, 196 archierei, 29141 congregations (churches) with 30544 priests.

During the 18 years of Alexiy's Patriarchy, the number of Orthodox in Russia has tripled. In 1990, only 24% of Russians identified their faith as Orthodox, while in 2008, 73% of Russians considered themselves Orthodox.

Aaaand... here's the crime rate in Russia 1987-2007!


Wow, correlation, right?

[Stuart]

I don't remember the exact quote, or who it's attributed to, but when someone was asked if they died and appeared before God would they worship him? "That depends on the apology he gives"

The full quote is

"That depends on the apology he gives. How dare he put OUR oil underneath THEIR sand?"

[Akkleptos]

Well, at least two officially atheist communities wouldn't go to war with one another over religious issues, as the case with flavours of Christianity, Islam and Judaism (and any combination thereof). Therefore, for a human community subscribing to atheism is looking better than subscribing to any major, exclusive religion.

On the aparent correlation (not necessarily causation) between the increase of professed religiousness of the population and the increase of crime rates, maybe some factors such as the belief in condemnation come in play? "I've done bad things, I'm going to hell... I might as well enjoy this life... If I gots to steal -maybe even kill- so be it..."

So who is Gregory S. Paul and what are his qualifications to opine on the salubrious quality of agnosticism? We spent a considerable amount of time attempting to discover where Mr. (Dr.?) Paul received his training in sociology and/or statistical analysis, etc. Here’s what we found:

The above blank space is not a formatting error of some kind. It is the best we could come up with to signify nada, zero, zip, bupkis, nihilo,…nothing. Yes, that’s right. We found nothing. As near as we can tell, Mr. Paul has no advanced degrees in statistical analysis, demography, sociology, or any other “ology.”

ahoooom*yawns* ad hominem. "The truth is the truth, be it said by Agamemnon or by his pig raiser". Retards.

The correlation is simple... the least religious the people are, the lower the crime rate. What to make of that, that's matter for subsequent studies. So religion is not necessary to maintain the fabric of society? Big deal. For all we know, it is religion that poisons and endangers a big chunk of society.

[Wicked Pilot]

Good thing Mr Paul didn't make the claim that the sun rises in the East. After all he has no advanced degrees in Astronomy, Cosmology, or any other "ology".

[Darth Wong]

Well, at least two officially atheist communities wouldn't go to war with one another over religious issues, as the case with flavours of Christianity, Islam and Judaism (and any combination thereof). Therefore, for a human community subscribing to atheism is looking better than subscribing to any major, exclusive religion.

On the aparent correlation (not necessarily causation) between the increase of professed religiousness of the population and the increase of crime rates, maybe some factors such as the belief in condemnation come in play? "I've done bad things, I'm going to hell... I might as well enjoy this life... If I gots to steal -maybe even kill- so be it..."

So who is Gregory S. Paul and what are his qualifications to opine on the salubrious quality of agnosticism? We spent a considerable amount of time attempting to discover where Mr. (Dr.?) Paul received his training in sociology and/or statistical analysis, etc. Here’s what we found:

The above blank space is not a formatting error of some kind. It is the best we could come up with to signify nada, zero, zip, bupkis, nihilo,…nothing. Yes, that’s right. We found nothing. As near as we can tell, Mr. Paul has no advanced degrees in statistical analysis, demography, sociology, or any other “ology.”

ahoooom*yawns* ad hominem. "The truth is the truth, be it said by Agamemnon or by his pig raiser". Retards.

The correlation is simple... the least religious the people are, the lower the crime rate. What to make of that, that's matter for subsequent studies. So religion is not necessary to maintain the fabric of society? Big deal. For all we know, it is religion that poisons and endangers a big chunk of society.

Funny how religious people suddenly rediscover the importance of qualifications now, after having ignored it for their entire lives when it came to the subject of biological science.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Funny how religious people suddenly rediscover the importance of qualifications now, after having ignored it for their entire lives when it came to the subject of biological science.

That's a bit harsh. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist and not all religious people are even Christians. The original argument of Dr. Paul was not directed only against fundamentalists but also against liberal Christians and in fact against all religious people.

Now, I don't agree with the notion that morality requires a supreme moral being, since there are scientific theories about the origins of moral and ethical behavior. In short morality is just an advanced form of social behavior. It is mostly displayed by Homo sapiens, but there are other species that display somewhat similar, although more "primitive" social behavior.

[Akkleptos]

That's a bit harsh. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist and not all religious people are even Christians. The original argument of Dr. Paul was not directed only against fundamentalists but also against liberal Christians and in fact against all religious people.

Well, most individuals are usually okay. But when we talk about a society as a whole, the correlation still applies. As I said before, why? how? we don't exactly know. Of course, many other factors contribute for higher crime rates in a certain area, but that's why we call it just a correlation, not a cause.

Now, I don't agree with the notion that morality requires a supreme moral being

Of course you don't, that's just silly. How could anyone possibly explain how a sense of morality comes from an intangible fist entelechy? Or from anywhere else than the brain?

In short, morality is just an advanced form of social behavior. It is mostly displayed by Homo sapiens, but there are other species that display somewhat similar, although more "primitive" social behavior.

Social behaviour does not necessarily entail morality, as we define it, as much as it comes as a result of evolutionary adaptation to try and ensure survival (think ants, chimpanzees, etc). And moral behaviour (in the sense of compassion, empathy, altruism, goodwill to others), as you point out, is not exclusive to humans:

Everyone here probably remembers this example (and lesson) in morality from a non-human.