US ambassador killed over a film

[Jester]

Three, actually. 1st, You err classically in linking causation and correlation. Can we make Africa wealthy by extirpating religion?

Wealthy? No. Wealthier? Yes. I'd be willing to put good money that, ceteris paribus, an Africa that woke up the next morning sans religion would be a more peaceful place, a happier place, and given enough time for education and reinvestment of resources wasted on religion, a richer place.

You are claiming that religion promotes harmony and cooperation. That is a causal story, backed (as far as I can tell) by shockingly little evidence. You snark that Secular Humanism isn't working out well. I show that, at first cut, the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. I don't believe that Atheism is the one and true cause of progress, surely not. But it helps, because religion sure doesn't.

I could grab a chart on poverty or violence and try to link it to atheism, but it's similarly intellectually dishonest.

It would be much more intellectually dishonest than merely conflating correlation and causation, because the correlation between poverty, violence, murder, and everything else and religion is positive, not negative. You'd have the relationship backwards.

It is ironic and clear to anyone who looks into the history of education, that most institutions were initially theologically driven.

Pretty much every country's transition from being mostly illiterate to being highly educated involved junking (or ignoring) the religious schools, and adopting a universal, secular education system. Some places and groups enjoyed a leg up on literacy (Sweden, for instance) due to religiously-based reading requirements. These, however, were the exception rather than the rule, and in any case, still follow the pattern of secularization and increasing education.

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.

Nice bon mots, but what is this in reply to? So the US is quite religious. It's also more violent, worse educated, and shorter lived than comparably rich, but less religious, countries. What's your point?

If we are talking about a person like Corrie Ten Boom finding the courage to oppose Nazi's, and the strength to survive a concentration camp, then I'd say the ends justify the means.

Like I said. If you're okay with anecdata, you can prove whatever case you like.

I can give you studies if you'd like that show specific measurable benefits. Notre Dame - National Study of Youth and Religion.

Okay. Three points. 1) Why, then, does the international cross-section hold up so well? Why, if the US is so much more religious, and religion is so effective at social harmony, does the US have vastly worse rates of violence, incarceration, drug crime, and lower education, life expectancy, and so on, vs. other comparable countries?

2) You asked initially about secular humanism. Does this study speak to that at all? I couldn't find anything about it. People who are merely apathetically irreligious are not the same as people who actively embrace a secular humanist philosophy.

3) This doesn't tell us anything about the effect of religion on the societies. It may well be that in religious societies, those who are religious (and therefore, a part of the hegemonic social order) are less prone to deviance than the irreligious. But it could at the same time be that, overall, those societies are made worse off by religion, even as the most religious are made better off individually.

Other things, like the story of Exodus, seems to fit (Thutmose III), but it would be nice to have greater Egyptian evidence describing the "uprisings" he quelled. The death of Thutmose III seems about right to fit with Passover.

Scholarly consensus appears to be that the Exodus is mythical. There was never a Jewish Exodus from Egypt, and if there is any grain of truth at all, it certainly doesn't resemble the myth of Moses.

No credible modern theology holds the details of those stories as accurate.

Good thing every religious person throughout the ages has been a subscriber to credible modern theology.

Most people for most of history, when taught their religion, are taught that it is literally true. For the Christians, this means that Adam and Eve were the progenitors of the species, that Noah took two of every animal on his ark, that the walls of Jericho came down, that Jesus walked on water, and that the world is fated to end in a terrible cataclysm following the coming of the anti-Christ. If you want to say *you* don't believe this, that's fine. But you asked about parents through the millenia, and through most of that time, these things were all taught as truths.

-Jester