It’s official, God is bad for business
From The Times - a survey seems to suggest that religgious belief is bad for the overall health of sociey
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.
“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.”
Now tell me something I don’t know.
To poke my oar in the water: There’s nothing wrong with faith per se, it’s just that montheistic religions are arranged in a pyramidal fashion with God at the top with a tier of priesthood above the commoners telling them what to think.
It seems to me that all forms of priesthood are inherently bigotted, narrowminded and fail to stand up for what makes the religion wonderful in the first place.
And the one thing that most of these intecessionary religions have is that they restrict access to the afterlife, telling people they are damned and going to Hell for whatever reason suits the priesthood
And it doesn’t matter what religion you come from - there is as much potential for vile bigotry in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, even Buddhism.
It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the people who claim for themselves the right to declare themselves messengers.
Let me be clear, I have met wonderful people filled with beautiful faith from all branches of reliogious belief and it can be a beautiful thing. It’s just when you get people commanding what can or can’t be taught in schools, whether it is the theory of evolution; sex education or just racial and cultural tolerance you know society is in trouble
