(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

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

I sometimes worry what would happen if the Pagans were put in charge. Would we, too, turn to dogma, greed, and power-grabbing?

I suspect so. People are people.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I like to think that, without hierarchy and dogma, a lot of the problems of organised religion would be lessened; but parts of Paganism exhibit both hierarchy and dogma, and of course Pagans are just human beings. Every new religious movement starts as free and undogmatic and challenging and soon fossilizes. It's depressing.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

People don't like change and uncertainty. Freedom and lack of dogma and challenge are all very well, as long as they're going your way. But when everyone else's freedom clashes with yours, regularly, and arguments erupt because there's no solid agreement on your tenets, and when you get continually frustrated by unexpected challenges ... fossilisation starts to look appealling.

I think if we want a huge society, we have to accept limits and structures and strictures and such. But, likewise, we can't have a huge society if those strictures are too limiting, or too exclusionary.

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

I...cannot begin to express the conceptual problems I have with that article. With that study, for that matter.

How are we defining religiousness? Are we talking about specific religions, or specific groups of religions, or including spirituality? Does belief in evolution negate religiousness, as they seem to be implying in the article? Is there any attention paid to how this religiousness is expressed? (In other words, if you mean conservative Christianity, say conservative Christianity, don't say "religious belief" in general.)

Bloody buggering hell, I am getting sick of the implication that religion is necessarily bad for you.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

News items are often unhelpfully vague about research. Fortunately in this case, the actual journal article is available online.

[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...)

[sheramil.livejournal.com]

i was, not exactly a full-on Pagan; let's say i was travelling at around warp 7. until i met a fundamentalist Alexandrian Wiccan who told me i wasn't going to the Summerland because i was one of those scum-sucking Proteans. at which point my warp field collapsed and i became a Subgenius.

Praise God-damned "Bob"!

i realised very quickly that the counterculture can be just as dogmatic and inflexible as the straights. Gary Clail was right.

[ikonsbykate.livejournal.com]

fundamentalist Alexandrian Wiccan who told me i wasn't going to the Summerland

Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce!

[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...

[sheramil.livejournal.com]

jocularity, indeed. until i realised she was serious. some people never learn.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

She will, after a few lifetimes as a snail. >:-)

[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*

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I visited the Protean Web site after sheramil's mention, and my first thought was, "How do I join these guys???"

[acelightning.livejournal.com]