InterestingBy Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
"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 in the prosperous democracies.
"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: "The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America."
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. "I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states," he added.
He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.
"The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.
"The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted."
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"It's a chicken and egg thing, but I think the research has it backwards. Education and material and physical security (i.e., housing, health care, and food) tends to reduce religiosity and to increase the wealth, health, wellbeing, etc., of societies. Rather than poverty, crime, sexual promiscuity, etc., being caused by religiosity, it is rather the reverse: religiosity is caused by poverty, both material and cultural.............."
Devious Comments
"(..)religiosity is caused by poverty, both material and cultural"; não podia concordar mais. Não confundir com espiritualidade (digo isto porque há muito boa gente a confundir a Religião com a Espiritualidade (que é pessoal, interior e ditada por canones que, para mim, variam de pessoa para pesso).
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"She´s no longer trapped by destiny and ever since she left go off her past, she found her life was beggining"
Concordo mto com o teu ponto de vista, a religiosidade é um aparato social que tende a intensificar-se quando há pobreza, basta ver o médio oriente/norte de africa. Embora eu acho o problema é mais complexo do q esse. As maiores civilizações do mundo foram lideradas por imperadores divinizados. E as superstições abundam tanto no antigo egipto, potencia civilizacional por excelencia, como no egipto actual. A secularização das sociedades gregas, a laicização do império romano, enquanto prototipos da sociedade actual não reflectiam a atitude generalizada do povo, que era de facto profundamente religiosa. A secularização, o ateismo é uma caracteristica da modernidade, é se quiseres o paradigma do novo Aeon, e como tal é complicado analiza-lo porque não temos verdadeiros padrões de referencia no passado. Obviamente que uma sociedade que abrace um sistema Ateu, Amoral, baseado na racionalidade, na justificação das normativas sociais em função de determinantes lógicos, tocando na ética apenas quando nada mais serve de solução, mais facilmente se coloca em harmonia com a "corrente", beneficiando da prosperidade que uma sociedade que não consiga por de lado o profeta do milénio passado certamente a longo prazo não vai conseguir benificiar. O intelecto é de facto (os factos comprovam-no) uma ferramenta suficiente para a ordem publica de uma sociedade de pessoas que tenham passado de homo sapiens servitorus para homo sapiens autonomus
kiss kiss
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For a minute there I lost myself... Yeah for a minute I lost myself...
beijinhos.
usa à vontade
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