Anti Religious Prejudice
First of all, let me be clear. I am an atheist. If you press me with “Okay, what happened before the Big Bang?” I will confess that I don’t know and therefore cannot deny the possibility of God. Maybe that makes me an agnostic. But I’m as secular as one can be.
Now read this prejudiced, narrow-minded, intolerant, anti-religious pseudo-science from PZ Myers. He cites a study that claims: “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.”
Now, to be fair, I don’t think this necessarily says that being religious is bad for the individual; it’s just not good for a culture. I also think it’s a bit sweeping in associating these ills with religious belief in general, because the US is afflicted with particularly malignant forms of religion (and at the root, the problem may not be religion itself, but irrationality and anti-intellectualism and ignorance, something our country has in volume). On the other hand, countries with more traditional religions also seem to have some serious problems (who knew Portugal was such a mess?). But heck yeah, it seems obvious to me that if you base national policy on pious ignorance and the low-rent tribal power fantasies of a bronze-age gang of thugs, you’re not going to cope well with the real issues of a modern pluralist society.
(In the Comments, he adds) The bottom line is that the US is far from being a great moral or even material exemplar–on average, it’s a crappy place to live.
Anyone in disagreement with PZ Myers is: “particularly malignant … irrationality and anti-intellectualism and ignorance … pious ignorance and the low-rent tribal power fantasies of a bronze-age gang of thugs.” Hmm … I guess that’s “fair.”
He reprints this chart, worthy of Paul at Wizbang:
The US is far larger, and far more diverse than those countries. Try looking at black vs. white homicide rates in the US. “In 2002 blacks were 7 times more likely to commit homicide and 6 times more likely to be victims of homicide than whites. The rate of homicide victimization for 2002 can be summarized by race & gender.”
Some will call me a racist for daring to post such data. But those are the facts. The CAUSES for differential rates are complex and tied up with poverty, education, etc. NOT inherent racial differences. Maybe African-Americans are more religious? Maybe that’s the problem? In all seriousness, if you look at vast swaths of “American culture,” i.e, suburban and rural areas, outside of high-drime inner cities, there is a wholly different story.
The claim that religious belief is responsible for a high homicide rate is about as absurd as claiming that it’s due to race.
Geez, the correlation in the graphs look really weak. Ditto most of the other figures. They all look like what I’d call a star chart. And look at this comment from the article:
Regression analyses were not executed because of the high variability of degree of correlation, because potential causal factors for rates of societal function are complex, and because it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions. Nor were multivariate analyses used because they risk manipulating the data to produce errant or desired results,<5> and because the fairly consistent characteristics of the sample automatically minimizes the need to correct for external multiple factors (see further discussion below). Therefore correlations of raw data are used for this initial examination.
Given the star charts they published, no wonder the authors didn’t even attempt any sort of statistical correlations. Even as a preliminary study, this looks like pretty thin gruel to me.
There are plenty of countries that are “off the charts.” Colombia and South Africa. Not included. Only “good” countries. You know “civilized, prosperosu democracies.”
They also left off Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia, which happen to be “good” European countries, but … oops .. with murder rates double the US.
Cant have them in there, messing up the data. I guess they must be “crappy places to live” too.
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