h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This has probably already been discussed somewhere, but is there any harm in going at it again?

'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.'

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

A preliminary report, of course, but rather disturbing conclusions. What do we think? Can a secular society be healthy? Can a religious society be healthy? Can there be a causal relationship between religiousity and societal health?

I'm sure it was at least *in* a discussion pretty recently, even if it wasn't the initial thread topic.

I'm not sure if there's much to say about it except 'well, this is worthy of further investigation'.

This is interesting anhaga. I am a bit surprised at the finding that life expectancy is lower in religious societies. This is a direct contradiction of another study I read a while back (I'll try to find a link to it) that stated that individuals who attend church regularly are healthier and have longer lifespans than non-attendees. Of course this study is concerned with society, not individuals. So apples and oranges, perhaps.

Any study that uses only one variable, in this case religious belief and practice, is interesting, but open to challenges. We have a known result - say a murder rate. So any variable can be said to have an effect on that result. People in the Midwest and Southeastern United States eat more fried catfish than in other parts of the country. Maybe the murder rate can be attributed to the consumption of fried fish. I know that's a silly example. Sorry.

See: F135418?thread=1106464

Thanks, Potholer, I'd missed that one.

I'd imagine that there could be a correlation in some parts with people's wealth and their tendency to go to church, but purely as a socio-economic factor and nothing more (with richer/better educated people being less religious).

With problems associated with sexuality, the 'don't-do-it's-bad-unless-you're-married' nonsense might be causally related, due to the 'conservative' wing of various religions. But even then, I'm sure socio-economic factors are probably more important.

This sounds like the tea and coffee thing. First you get a survey that says one of them is especially good/bad for you, then another follows saying the other is the same/opposite, and it rolls on for months. There seem to have been quite a few surveys about religion (or lack of it) and the social effects this has. Can we draw any meaningful conclusions at all, I wonder?

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"This is interesting anhaga. I am a bit surprised at the finding that life expectancy is lower in religious societies. This is a direct contradiction of another study I read a while back (I'll try to find a link to it) that stated that individuals who attend church regularly are healthier and have longer lifespans than non-attendees. Of course this study is concerned with society, not individuals. So apples and oranges, perhaps."

Apples and oranges indeed. The factor that extends life expectancy is an active social network. Because many churches provide a social network on a plate there is a correlation between church attendance and amount of social interaction.

What the study reflects is a deleterious effect on society in general resulting from high church attendance.

As mentioned in the other thread, the USA may be different as a result of being more of a recent-immigrant nation than many older European countries (in terms of social structure, and the amount of imported religiosity). People may also turn to religion (or move away from it less quickly than others) when society as a whole seems threatening, or there may be more complicated causal factors that cause two things to be correlated without those things causing each other.

One thing that a study showing a wide correlation between two factors can do is at least make one pretty suspicious of claims that the correlation should be the other way around.

<>

Yeah we always hear reported the first tentative conclusions of a particular kind of study, because it sounds newsworthy. We don't get to hear when there is enough evidence to reach confident conclusions.

But as I said in my previous post this study does not contradict the finding about church attendance and longevity. So do you have any particular criticisms of it, other than that it reaches a conclusion you don't like?

It could be argued, perhaps, that these places have high church attendance because they have social problems and church is perceived to be a solution. And churches do market themselves as a solution to these problems. This may well be the case as well, but you would still expect to see some benefits if church did any good at all.

I think I'd like to see 'religion' and 'fundamentalism' investigated separately. I like to think that the former is (overall) beneficial, whereas the latter (is not.

There is a big problem in today's world, and it's fundamentalism. Those who believe they have access to the One And Only Truth find it difficult to tolerate those whose beliefs differ, as they are (must be!) wrong! This perspective is anti-social, and should (I believe) be strongly opposed wherever it is detected.

In a forum like this one, the primary threat is not from religious fundamentalists, but from fundy science-ists. Of course this is not reflected in society at large, where religious fundamentailists exist in much (much!) larger numbers.

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>>"In a forum like this one, the primary threat is not from religious fundamentalists, but from fundy science-ists."

The threat of *what*, exactly?

The intolerance, and consequential unpleasantness, of fundamentalist behaviour, as seen and discussed at length. All fundamentalists are the same in this sense; only the lengths they are prepared to go to distinguish them.

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Just to play mythical-agent-of-evil's advocate for a moment:

A virulent believer that God spoke to Moses from a burning bush is something different from a virulent believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first can point to a dusty old book as his only evidence while the second has a big wide universe.

Agreed. But while there are differences of belief between individual humans (forever? ), the intolerance due to fundamentalism will be a problem. Fundamentalists seek to impose their beliefs on others....

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I'm not sure what a scientific fundamentalist would look like. Religion is about beliefs while science is about knowledge. Religion is about faith and revelation and 'knowledge' founded on something other than empirical evidence while science, ideally, is about coming to understand the facts of the universe through evidence which can be examined and re-examined by all-comers. I don't quite see where the idea of fundamentalism as imposing one's beliefs can come into science. It's not the scientist who imposes the belief, it's the universe. If someone chooses to ignore the universe as science has shown it to be, no scientist is going to try to force that person to believe it: They'll find out soon enough.

Teaching evolution in a biology class is not imposing beliefs, for example: it's just teaching biology.

Like any other fundamentalist, I expect. *What* a fundamentalist believes is irrelevant to their social impact. It is their belief that only they have access to the truth that is the problem, because it leads them to (seek to) impose their way of looking at things onto others.

For example, someone who said (without irony) that rational empiricist methods are the *only* correct way to investigate the real world, and sought to impose this view, would be a fundamentalist.

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'someone who said (without irony) that rational empiricist methods are the *only* correct way to investigate the real world, and sought to impose this view, would be a fundamentalist.'

but . . . rational empiricist methods *are* the only correct way . . .

but there's no need to impose that view: the Darwinian universe will take care of the imposing.

We all believe our way is the right way, sometimes the *only* right way, to do it (whatever 'it' is). If the latter, *and* we also seek to impose this view on others, we are fundamentalists. If we don't, we aren't.



This is the same as a deeply religious person concluding that God will, in Her own good time, convince/inform others of the error of their ways. It is the view of a tolerant, balanced and social person. (IMO, of course. ) The fundamentalist leans toward burning witches!

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