Religion makes the World a better place

They suffer from being small-scale and geographically centralised. When you say: "I would have liked to cite being in physical journals or books, which I am obviously unable to provide links to (and I hardly expect Con or the voters to rush out and buy them to determine their information's reliability)", you do me an injustice. I am rational and fair-minded enough to actually want to know if I'm wrong. Therefore I ask that you at least list the sources which you have which have obviously convinced you of the truth of the proposition. I may well purchase access to an academic paper or buy a book (I may even prove to you that I have done so). I don't want to believe wrong things! When you say "most of the research on the topic of religion's correlation with better health (which is, in itself, a fairly young area of study) comes from the United States" and "there is so far a paucity of resources as far as the world at large is concerned" then you are implicitly agreeing that the jury is still out on the question, so you can hardly claim it as a point to you in this debate. Don't believe things without sufficient evidence, please; if you do, please don't expect the rest of us to share your opinions. "I can endeavour to find studies with more representative subject pools should Con request it" - please do so. It is true that we have to be careful how we interpret brute data. I could have started by citing some very strong statistics that link religiosity with murder rates all over the World. All over the World. At any scale. .. religious regions have more murder, religious countries have more murder, religious continents have more murder. Murder and religion are heavily correlated. This does not, as Pro so rightly reminds us, imply causation. Nobody should be saying that these statistics simply mean that "religion causes murder"; that would be a grave error in interpretation. But what's the alternative to this fallacious reasoning? What is the underlying story that causes both murder and religion? Perhaps it's poverty. .. perhaps it's political instability. .. perhaps it's violence. Indeed, those three things are correlated with both murder and religion. It's interesting to note, is it not, that religion thrives in hard times? If one were being frightfully cynical, one might make a statement such as "religion finds it easier to get its claws into the young, the old, the weak, the poor, the sick, the dying and the disenfranchised". It upset me to read "Zuckerman's broad-brushing of the issue smacks much more of bias than science". I did not attack the bias of Pro's sources, although well I might have done. I withheld from such an attack without solid evidence. I ask Pro to explain what evidence he has of Zuckerman's bias. I have studied the report in detail and find, if anything, an admirable lack of bias. "When considering these kinds of statistics on a global scale, there are too many factors involved. One cannot take the stance of "all things being equal. ""Well put, Pro, well put. It is very tricky to draw the right conclusions when studying something so complex as causation of effects in human society. We must always remember exactly what questions we are seeking to ask, and we must be open to some explanations that put our statistics in a different light. Quite so, quite so. Here's a confounding factor: religions often (from their high horses of claimed love for all) preach against atheists. Atheism is a moral wickedness, in many religions' eyes; indeed, false belief is really bad. If we look at the Bronze Age writings that form the core of certain Abrahamic faiths, we find that the right thing to do to people who believe in the wrong God is to stone them to death. Nice, that, isn't it, for religions that claim to be peace-loving, tolerant, modern and enlightened? Let me remind the gentle audience of what the bible has to say about that:Psalm 14:1The fool says in his heart, “There is no God. ” - They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, - there is none who does good. Deuteronomy 13:6-9If your brother, your mother’s son, or your son or daughter, or the wife you cherish, or your friend who is as your own soul, entice you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods’ (whom neither you nor your fathers have known, of the gods of the peoples who are around you, near you or far from you, from one end of the earth to the other end), you shall not yield to him or listen to him; and your eye shall not pity him, nor shall you spare or conceal him. But you shall surely kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. (An enquiring reader might also read Deuteronomy 17:2-5)Bear in mind that there are people who believe that the bible is the literal Word of God and is inerrant and infallible. Either way, it remains true that some once-religious people who "come out" as atheists lose their friends, their families and their jobs (especially in America). Now, would it not be fair to factor this kind of effect into any discussion on the effects of religion? I mean, if people lived longer and happier as part of a Mafia group in a certain region because of the effects of that Mafia on non-members, should we conclude that the group makes the World a better place? I should think not! Thus I suggest that the fairest thing we should be doing is comparing countries that are mostly atheistic to countries that are mostly theistic to get an impartial assessment without conflicting effects. This has the added bonused of beating potentially biased surveys and including very large numbers of people in the mix. .. this produces accuracy. I invite Pro to raise the debate to this level. I note with joy that Pro's second link does exactly this: it makes the case that poverty causes religion. Now, it's interesting reading, and it asks us a new question: is it true that religion alleviates the depravations of extreme poverty? I assume that Pro thinks that it does (I do not) but I invite Pro to address this more interesting question. Pro says "Zuckerman's article mentions that the most religious states, such as Alabama and Louisiana, have the highest rates of murder. They also tend to have high rates of gun ownership and lax laws [5]" - again, I ask: please could we get to the beating heart of the issue by asking what the reason is for a correllation between gun ownership and religion; or lax laws and religion? What's really going on? I couldn't find a nice description of the raw facts on the internet, so I've composed my own, based on the most populous countries in the World (>100,000,000 people). I include population, degree of religiosity and intentional homicide rate (per 100,000 people per year)China (1.4 billion) - 41% religious - murder rate 1India (1.3 billion) - 84% religious - murder rate 3.5US (0.32 billion) - 66% religious - murder rate 4.7Indonesia (0.26 billion) - 81% religious - murder rate 0.6Brazil (0.20 billion) - 92% religious - murder rate 25Pakistan (0.19 billion) - 98% religious - murder rate 7.7Nigeria (0.18 billion) - 98% religious - murder rate 20Bangladesh (0.16 billion) - 99% religious - murder rate 2.7Russia (0.15 billion) - 58% religious - murder rate 9.2Japan (0.13 billion) - 29% religious - murder rate 0.3Mexico (0.12 billion) - 56% religious - murder rate 21.5Philippines (0.10 billion) - 95% religious - murder rate 8.8 As you can see, there is a positive correlation between religiosity and murder rate. Now, I am not making the fallacy of jumping straight to "therefore religion causes murder" - what I am saying, though, is that if you want to be sure that "religion makes the World a better place", you've got an awful lot of work to do explaining why it seems to be the other way around. In Nigeria, half the Muslim community agree with the death penalty for leaving Islam and there are regions with strict apostasy laws. In Pakistan, 64% of the population want the death penalty for converting from Islam [1]. In Bangladesh, it's a much more tolerant 36% of people who think that men, women and children should be killed for non-belief [1]. If you add up the populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh, you get more than the population of the US. Looking at these people, about 50% are convinced that it is the morally correct thing to do to kill people who lose their faith. I don't think that you can fairly ignore these facts when asking "does religion make the World a better place? ". [1] . http://www.pewforum.org...p.s. I am going to use the next round to further the case that religion, in fact, makes the World a worse place. I will use Round 5 for summing up and final rebuttals. I just thought that I'd give Pro a chance to focus a little more globally before I brought the big guns out :)