In a recently released study (and I use that tern very loosely) from the Journal of Religion and Society, Gregory S. Paul determines that religion and democracy are a combination that becomes detrimental to societies.
Paul’s ‘research’ comes to the conclusion that too much religion and too much freedom mix like oil and water, creating a cesspool of a society where violence (murder, suicide, etc), disease (STD’s in particular) and activities that are the polar opposites of the mainstream moral/religious beliefs of said country (namely teenage pregnancy and abortion) run rampant.
Unfortunately for Mr. Paul, he looks for much too little evidence before reaching his conclusion. Also, he is an anti-Christian writer and speaker at the Center for Secular Humanism. One of his articles is titled The Great Scandal: Christianity and the Rise of the Nazis.
Just like the left and Prescott Bush, if you can’t call them Nazi’s directly, you can imply that they sympathized with them.
Mr. Paul’s study does nothing but prove that those who hate Judeo/Christian religiosity will pick and choose their evidence well when they have a point to make. I do believe that he should re-read the notes he took in college, especially the part that says “correlation does not equal causation�.
If you even just take a quick glance at the study, you’ll first probably notice that it doesn’t take the modern democratic state of Israel into account. Nor does it look at states with a large percentage of Muslims in the population.
So basically, he is just attacking Christianity in general and Christians in particular, using the old “Christians are Hypocrites� line, but stretching it out for pages upon pages of text.
As you all should know by now, I am not Christian, nor am I a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindi or a member of any other religion you can think of. I sit here not knowing and not caring one way or the other about what or how other folks wish to worship or even if they do, so long as they leave me alone to not do my worshiping.
So what has raised my ire up for Mr. Paul, you ask?
This bit right here: “The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly.�
Those two sentences are taken verbatim, with no edits on my part from Section 18 of the published report on this ‘study’. I had figured I would have to wait for him to bash America for being too rich, too free and too religious until later in the report, but I was wrong.
Mr. Paul cannot actually prove his theory. He says that the UK is more secular than the US because a survey shows that more people there believe in evolution over creationism than people in America. I guess it has never occurred to him that there are practicing Christians, probably numbering in the millions in both countries, who actually believe in portions of both theories. I guess in his closed door, black and white world, you must either believe in one or the other.
With attitudes such as that little display, Mr. Paul shows himself to be no better than hateful men such as Fred Phelps, an all or nothing preacher of religion. Secular Humanism is a religion in and of itself and it is Mr. Paul’s belief of choice.
While I’m not surprised at his pushing it, I am surprised at him using the tactics he claims to find so repulsive.
The Left will never get over its frustration at the US’s relatively slow pace at going socialist. Paul’s infantile sniping is just more of the same ol’ psychological warfare.
Sunday night we had dinner with some older SF Bay Area liberals — all of them grew up in the ’60s, etc. One of them had read Jon Krakauer’s new book about the continuing expansion of the Mormon church beyond Utah. Neither my wife nor I are at all religious, but we both were struck that the folks at the table were terribly worried about the mere idea that the Mormon church was gaining converts — a typical bigoted Bay Area secular-liberal reaction, but one I hadn’t run into for a while. Had we been talking of Buddhists, for example, I don’t think there would have been any worry at all.