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Doctor of Philosophy? What disease is that?
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virus: Better off without Him...
« on: 2005-10-12 16:36:06 » |
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11/10/2005
Better off without Him
Filed under: religion
New research suggests that the Christian virtues are best represented in
godless societies
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th October 2005
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( . 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
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