Religion and Health

The TimesOnline has an interesting article, Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side', by Ruth Gledhill.

The article is about Gregory S. Paul's research paper, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies, published in the Journal of Religion & Society.

It is unfortunate that Ms. Gledhill, in the first paragraph of her article, makes a basic statistics mistake about the findings of the article and research. She says:

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

What the paper shows is that countries that are religious have higher rates of murder, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and suicide than secular countries. The paper also shows that the two areas in the United States with the highest religious and anti-evolution belief, the midwest and the south, have higher rates of murder, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and suicide than other parts of the country. However, basic statistics tells us that correlation does not prove causality. You can't say religion causes murder, or murder causes religion. Well, you could say it, but you might not be right. That doesn't make the results any the less interesting though.

Gregory Paul calls his research a preliminary result and makes a call for more research to find the underlying causes of the result. I'm not familiar with the research in this area, but I've heard the question many times,"if America is so religious, then why is there so much murder and mayhem there?"

You can arrive at some preliminary conclusions though.

Religion by itself does not make a country moral. You cannot blame the ills of the society on the dozen or so atheists lurking in the shadows and alleys of America. There just aren't that many of them.

The moral categories under study and question happen to be the categories we here about from the activist Fundamentalists all the time. I think is safe to conclude that there a lot of hypocrites running around. Hypocrisy is one test of the strength of moral beliefs no matter from where they derive.

I have read about other psychology studies that indicate that people who have solid spiritual lives seem to suffer less from diseases like depression. That's another thing that makes it all perplexing.

Politics, society, culture, and economics. I wished it wasn't all so confusing. I might not run for President after all. I didn't really want to be forced to talk about my affairs anyway.

Maybe, crime and immorality does cause religion. It could be about atoning for one's sins and all that. Where did I put my Dostoevsky?

Note: I got the links to the article and paper from two other blogs, but I'm darned if I remember who they are. My apologies to both, and I'll post it when memory serves me better.