Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Quite a lot of attention has been given to the results of this study into the relationship between religious belief and social problems:"Belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional... He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added. "
Of course, on the basis of this description it would probably be more accurate to say that religious belief has done nothing in the United States to arrest or prevent these problems, given that any number of socio-economic conditions that are not present in other countries could be more important as causal factors. In either case, religion does not effectively play the role of enforcing collective moral codes that Durkheim saw it performing (though I always felt that advocating religion on social rather than spiritual grounds was putting the cart before the horse). However, that still leaves the more interesting question of the role religion has played in producing the socio-economic conditions I mentioned; for instance, by stressing individual salvation over collective responsibility (after all, much of modern liberalism and socialism has been at least in part a gradual secularisation of certain roles previously specific to religion). For example, one of the central characteristics of American politics in recent years has been the characterisation of liberals as elitists opposed to traditional values, with this being used as a means of persuading working class voters to vote contrary to what one might expect their economic interests to be:"Republicans are still the party of corporate management, but they have also spent years honing their own populist approach, a melange of anti-intellectualism, promiscuous God-talk and sentimental evocations of middle America in all its humble averageness... a collection of gripes that faults leftists not because of their lack of faith in the free market, but because of the cultural monstrosities they have imposed on the good people of middle America: they have legalized abortion, stamped out prayer in the public schools and are now threatening to sanction gay marriage."Labels: Religion
posted by Richard 11:15 am
