Religion and niceness

Over at Slate, Paul Bloom takes a look at a seeming paradox. On the one hand, American atheists seem to be less happy than believers. On the other, mostly atheistic societies like Norway and Sweden are much happier and healthier than the US. He suggests that it’s the result of community and exclusion.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

Coincidentally vjack has a piece up at Atheist Revolution endorsing the idea that philanthropy may be a good organizing principle for atheist community.

Emergency preparedness

Following on from my recent posting about securing the bookshelves to the wall, I’ve now obtained a three day disaster readiness pack. It’s a good basic kit, but I had to throw in a few obvious extras: a crank-chargeable flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, and some glucose and caffeine tablets. Add a few litres of bottled water (replenished regularly), and we should be all set. Let’s hope it remains unused.

Redefining "Single-Celled"

You think “single-celled” means “microsopic”? Meet Gromia sphaerica. 1.2 cm across. That’s the size of a grape. And they leave trails – and they may have been doing so all the way back to the Preambrian Precambrian.

Gimme that old time dysfunctionality…

Ruth Gledhill reviews belatedly catches up with Gregory Paul’s study in the latest a 2005 issue of the Journal of Religion and Society. She begins thus:

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 correlations between religious belief and social dysfunction won’t come as a surprise to my (mostly) secular liberal readers. However one should always be cautious about leaping from correlation to causation. Case in point: there is a strong regional correlation in the USA between religiosity and violent crime. However both are also negatively correlated with education and economic status, and these are rather more plausible causal agents.
Gledhill writes:

He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills.

Really? This could be interesting, and certainly worth reading. At the very least, it looks pretty conclusive that religion does nothing to mitigate or reduce social dysfunction.
UPDATE: Thanks to benjdm for the correction.

And the award for the most ridiculous non-sequitur of the year….

The award goes to Dan Henninger, writing in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. (Well, it had to be there, or the NRO, or the Weekly Standard, didn’t it?) So, what caused the financial melt-down? We’re talking about a crisis brought on by Republican-inspired deregulation, and overseen by a government of Republican Christianists, whose power base lies in the southern parts of the USA…
Dan starts off well:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Well, that makes sense. After all, the absence of “responsibility, restraint and remorse” has defined the Bush years, from foreign policy to deficits, to energy and taxation. And as Dan emphasizes…

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down.

Very good. And the reason why responsibility and restraint have failed us is…? (Fasten seat belt: prepare for neck-snapping non-sequitur.)

And so we come back to the disappearance of “Merry Christmas.”
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Breathtaking. I guess he subscribes to the notion that if you’re going to say something silly, make it outrageously silly. I particularly liked the idea of how dangerous secularizing “flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people”. (What else would they be – apes? Oh, wait….)
(Tip o’ the hat to PZ.)

How to get a bachelor's degree in bullshit

Q. Where would you expect to find textual material such as the following?

The Life Force, then, with its almost holy purity, is in danger of being inhibited, dampened down and threatened by what amounts to some entirely physical dirt that gains access to that temple of the soul the human body. Whilst in Traditional Chinese Medicine impurities in the mind, emotions or spirit are just as important as physical impurity, it is naturopathy that focuses upon the actual physical sewers of the body.

A. In the course notes for a B.Sc. (yes, that’s a Bachelor of Science) degree course in “Nutritional Medicine” at Thames Valley University in England.
WTF?!?!
Full details here.

The death of obedience

Andrew Sullivan considers the iconic role of traditional marriage for many conservatives in a very nice piece entitled Modernity, Faith, And Marriage. He writes of Rod Dreher, who…

… longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women’s role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.

And he continues:

If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces.[…] The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.

Naturally, Sully has the answer: his Oakeshottian attempt to infuse faith with doubt, and thus accept…

… that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature.

But to achieve this, we must confront the institutions of reaction; the ones that demand “obedience”. Andrew and I both grew up in a country in which Queen Elizabeth the Second was “Fidei Defensor” (Defender of the Faith), and Andrew still professes membership in a religious institution of which the head, Pope Benedict XVI, frequently exhorts his followers to “obedience” and bemoans the evil influence of education.
Obedience is dead. Ditto deference, and all forms of argument from authority. The Enlightenment made them absurd; pluralism makes them unworkable.
Here’s an amusing bit of cognitive dissonance: imagine a Pope such as John Paul II and Benedict claiming that they were “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”? Silly, isn’t it?

21st Century Britpop

On a couple of occasions over the last few years I’ve found myself taking a day-long car trip through the UK. Each time I’ve listened to Radio 1, or perhaps one of the local radio stations, and I’ve been struck by the difference between the US and UK music scenes. Here in the US, I’m not sure that thee is a recognizable “US scene” any more: the markets have ben sliced, diced, segmented, targeted, and effectively isolated. Crossover? Not a lot. But in the UK it feels to me that there is still a recognizably British sound, style, gestalt, whatever.
So I’m driving along, listening to the music, and eventually I stop at a motorway services for some food. And I wander through the W.H.Smiths shop, picking up a bottle of Lucozade and a Formula 1 magazine, and checking out the cut-price audio CDs that are on sale. And twice now I’ve found myself buying a CD by a UK artist that (a) I don’t really know, (b) hasn’t broken out in the US, and (c) feels like an archetypically British act. And each time I’m been delighted.
Last year I bought the Oasis “greatest hits” collection, Stop The Clocks. How could I not own any Oasis? Never mind. This time, I found myself looking at Robbie Williams Escapology. Former boy-band member, darling of the football crowds, consummate show-off…. Anyay, I bought it, and I was blown away. A bit uneven, but really good stuff. And this weekend I followed up by getting Rudebox, which is even better. The collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, “She’s Madonna”, is simply wonderful. Highly recommended.

Who will I discover next time, I wonder?