(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

Some thought-provoking news items on religion:

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

Gakked from nostalgia_lj: Do Unnatural Acts Cause Natural Disasters?

In brief: higher rates of religious belief coincide with higher rates of social ills such as murder and STDS; no correlation between numbers of gay citizens and natural disasters.

I sometimes worry what would happen if the Pagans were put in charge. Would we, too, turn to dogma, greed, and power-grabbing? Or would we simply be unable to form a stable government?

Comments

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

Hm. And now I feel better about saying, yes, you should explicitly state you're talking about Christianity if that's what you mean by religion. I'm curious to see how, say, India would show up in something like this. (I pull out an example from the current segment in my religion class.) Also, how about some discussion of change over time?

An interesting aside -- "Japan, Scandinavia, and France are the most secular nations in the west" -- quoted verbatim from the article. Since when is Japan in the west, never mind the West?

There's a rather ethnocentric primacy placed on belief in science.

I'm not saying that I don't think that evangelical Christian ideas don't contribute to, say, teen pregnancy rates and abortion rates and STD rates in the US -- I'm sure they do. But there's a level of generalization going on here that I'm not sure is valid.

(Full disclosure: I'm an anthropology student, and I tend to think that statistics are nonsense...)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I agree - there are multiple handwaves in the article (annoyingly characteristic of hardline atheism) which lump the most conservative Christians together with everyone else, however liberal and of whatever faith. Citations of the surveys which show all believers think religion improves society are notably absent.

I think it's fair to mention Darwin, whose ideas exploded the logical necessity for a Creator, the backlash against which produced Creationism and similar conservativism. What's misleading and foolish is to create an imaginary split between religion on the one hand, and Darwin on the other, since MOST MAJOR FAITHS ACCEPT EVOLUTION.

It's a shame the article's so shabby; at least it admits it's not a "definitive" study, but is only trying to start discussion. With Christian extremists in the US actually blaming natural disasters and terrorism on gays, etc, it's an issue worth examining.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"What's misleading and foolish is to create an imaginary split between religion on the one hand, and Darwin on the other, since MOST MAJOR FAITHS ACCEPT EVOLUTION."

You nailed it.

The emperor/researcher has no clothes. I shake my head in desair and move along...

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

This article is disturbingly exactly like my intro-world-religions class here at my oh-so-liberal college, in which most people tend to interpret "religion" as meaning "Christianity" (which is, by the way, hardly a limited phenomenon: the Journal of Religion is all monotheistic and mostly Judeo-Christian). But it's one of those things that, no matter how often we point out the limitations of their bias, it just never goes away. *sigh*