US ambassador killed over a film

[kandrathe]

I would say that it is a much safer bet that the nations with higher murder rates are more correlated with economic and social inequality, rather than atheism?

No. It shows almost nothing. It's also deceptive since our murder rates mostly derive from small areas rife with poverty, gangs, and drug violence. The chart distorts by distributing all that murder in small areas to large areas hardly even populated. You'd also find the same distortion in Jester's chart on Atheism -- where we know that it's concentrated more on the coasts, and less so in the heartland. And... I think it's perhaps a stretch to spread world atheism (about 2.5%) across a global map trying to draw correlation conclusions. We might just as well compare wealth to the chances of being in a rock band.

Nations aren't individuals, with the propensity to be atheist or even inherently wealthy. You need to tie wealth, or whatever characteristic to atheism in individuals, whereby the preponderance of wealthy people are atheists, or that the preponderance of religious people are poor. It's still a correlation, and requires further examination for cause. Similarly, to tie a correlation to murder, one would need to examine the religiosity (more than stated denomination, e.g. weekly attendance) of murderers in comparison to the same proportions in the general population. A high proportion of atheists are very highly educated, and highly educated people tend not to be incarcerated for murder -- unless they are off the deep end like Ted Kazinski. If you want to cut down on crime, send more poor kids from bad neighborhoods to college.

We completely disagree on this.

That is fine with me. I believe we have a long history of weaving a morality and ethic from Judeo-Christian origins, inherited from Britain, into our civil and criminal codes, not to mention the less desirable normative side effects like the definition of "marriage". In the whole, I think our attempts at balancing law and freedom are successful -- compared to the various other examples throughout history. I'll offer John Locke's influential 2nd Treatise on Government as evidence of the inculcation of religiosity in the fabric of our civil society and governance. To me, this is not a bad thing. Quite the opposite. It is challenging to protect the rights of a minority. Especially when they are purposefully cantankerous and irascible.

3rd, you are cherry picking your statistics. According to the most recent Pew Research Poll, roughly 5% of the US are atheist, and another 5% would be agnostic. Leaving about +85% that believing in God, or some higher power controlling the universe. Aaron Levenstein said that statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

Appeal to nature (or authority) fallacy. Most people do it, therefore it must be right.

What posterior did you pull that from? I'm appealing to practices of statistics and logic. An appeal to nature would be "a phenomenon is described as desirable because it is natural, or undesirable because it is unnatural,"

This is why I avoid discussing things with you (and the annoyingly arrogant over use of eye rolling) -- when you don't have any defensible retort you declare something incomprehensible. We've discussed the poll and the high percentage of US that "believe in God, or a higher power" and it's upwards of 85%. So, the US is about 4.5% atheists compared to a world average of 2.5% and we are among the wealthiest of nations. Then, considering standard error (+/- %) there is very little difference really. Really! I'd call that statistically insignificant. Beyond that, it's easily disproved by looking at the contrary correlation of wealth and religiosity of many middle eastern nations, like Qatar, or UAE. If we set the way-back machine to the 1700's, then the premise would be just the opposite.

This is the type of shit that distorts history.

I don't look at a movie like "The Longest Day" as historical reference for WWII, even though it's mostly accurate. It's not a documentary, it's a movie based on a story. All stories, however factual, are colored by the opinions / biases of the story teller. Therefore, by your definition, all history is distorted shit.