[Mb-civic] Better Off Without Him

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

I could not resist passing this fairly thoughtful
article along.  It is sure to get some hackles up! 
--Mha Atma

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-10/23monbiot.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Better Off Without Him October 23, 2005
By George  Monbiot 

Are religious societies better than secular ones? It
should be an easy
question for athiests to answer. Most of those now
seeking to blow people
up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and
passenger planes -
do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose
religion forbids them
to harm insects setting light to human beings. 

A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications
network sustains
his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying
women ownership of
their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just
united in the cause
of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the
legalisation of assisted
suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait
is an absence of
self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be
absent from the mind
of the believer than the infidel. 

But we also know that few religious governments have
committed atrocities
on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though,
given their more
limited means, the Spanish and British in the
Americas, the British,
Germans and Belgians in Africa and the British in
Australia and India
could be said to have done their best). 

It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if
God does not exist,
then everything is permissible."(1) Nor can we wholly
disagree with the
new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a
dictatorship of
relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own
ego and one's own
desires."(2) 

(We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent
his life campaigning
to become God's go-between, and who now believes he is
infallible, is
immune to such impulses). 

The creationists in the United States might be as mad
as a box of ferrets,
but what they claim to fear is the question which
troubles almost everyone
who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have
no purpose, why
should we care about other people's? 

We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian
last month, that
"good works ... are most likely to be performed by
people who believe that
heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is
impossible to doubt
that faith and charity go hand in hand."(3) 

The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic
missionaries. Joe Haas,
an Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West
Papua, had spent
his life acting as a human shield for the indigenous
people of Indonesia:
every few months soldiers threatened to kill him when
he prevented them
from murdering his parishioners and grabbing their
land.(4) 

Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of
north-eastern Brazil,
thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was
a gunman the
ranchers had sent for him. Yet still he opened it.
With the other
liberation theologists in the Catholic church, he
offered the only
consistent support to the peasants being attacked by
landowners and the
government.(5) If they did not believe in God, these
men would never have
taken such risks for other people. 

Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted
systematically to answer the
question with which this column began. But in the
current edition of the
Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called
Gregory Paul tests
the hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush
administration, that
religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal
violence, suicide,
non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion". He
compared data from 18
developed democracies, and discovered that the
Christian fundamentalists
couldn't have got it more wrong.(6) 

"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 ... None
of the strongly
secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing
high levels of
measurable dysfunction." 

Within the United States "the strongly theistic,
anti-evolution South and
Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality,
STD, youth pregnancy,
marital and related problems than the Northeast where
... secularization,
and acceptance of evolution approach European norms". 

Three sets of findings stand out: the associations
between religion -
especially absolute belief - and juvenile mortality,
venereal disease and
adolescent abortion. 

Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the
under-5s in
Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US - the most
religious country
in his survey - in a league of its own for gonorrhea
and syphilis.
Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian
societies are
"pro-life" is the finding that "increasing adolescent
abortion rates show
positive correlation with increasing belief and
worship of a creator ...
Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates
(John Paul II) are
therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."(7)

These findings appear to match the studies of teenage
pregnancy I've read.
The rich countries in which sexual abstinence
campaigns, generally
inspired by religious belief, are strongest have the
highest early
pregnancy rates(8). The US is the only rich nation
with teenage pregnancy
levels comparable to those of developing nations: it
has a worse record
than India, the Philippines and Rwanda(9). Because
they're poorly educated
about sex and in denial about what they're doing (and
so less likely to
use contraceptives), boys who participate in
abstinence programmes are
more likely to get their partners pregnant than those
who don't(10). 

Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the
rankings cannot
reflect national poverty - the US has the world's 4th
highest GDP per
head, Ireland the 8th - the nations which do well in
Paul's study also
have higher levels of social spending and distribution
than those which do
badly. Is this a cause or an association? In other
words, are religious
societies less likely to distribute wealth than
secular ones? 

In the US, where governments are still guided by the
Puritan notions that
money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and
poverty is a mark of
moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds
with the dispersal of
wealth. But the UK - one of the most secular societies
in Paul's study -
is also one of the least inclusive, and does rather
worse in his charts
than countries with similar levels of religion. The
broad trend, however,
looks clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution
democracies have ... come
closest to achieving practical "cultures of
life"."(11) 

I don't know whether these findings can be
extrapolated to other countries
and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example,
at whether
religious belief is associated with a nation's
preparedness to go to war
(though I think we could hazard a pretty good guess)
or whether religious
countries in the poor world are more violent and have
weaker cultures of
life than secular ones. Nor - because, with the
exception of Japan, the
countries in his study are predominantly Christian or
post-Christian - is
it clear whether there's an association between social
dysfunction and
religion in general or simply between social
dysfunction and Christianity.


But if we are to accept the findings of this one - and
so far only - wide
survey of belief and human welfare, the message to
those who claim in any
sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want
people to behave as
Christians advocate, you should tell them that God
does not exist. 

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1879. The Brothers Karamazov. 

2. Joseph Ratzinger, 18th April 2005. Homily. Vatican
Radio. 

http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?id=33987.

3. Roy Hattersley, 12th September 2005. Faith does
breed charity. The
Guardian. 

4. See George Monbiot 1989, Poisoned Arrows: an
investigative journey
through Indonesia. Republished 2004 by Green Books. 

5. George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed. Michael
Joseph, London. 

6. Gregory S. Paul, 2005. Cross-National Correlations
of Quantifiable
Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and
Secularism in the Prosperous
Democracies: A First Look. The Journal of Religion and
Society, Volume 7. 

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

7. ibid. 

8. Figures from the UNFPA's State of World Population
report 2003 for
births per 1000 women between 15 and 19 years old are
presented in graph
and graphic form at: 

http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127&country=GB#rowGB

9. ibid. 

10. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions
To Reduce Unintended
Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of
Randomised Controlled
Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426. 

11. Gregory S. Paul, ibid. 





	
		
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