Punishment @ MindSay

I'm an idiot...I'm a glutton for punishment....Those of u who know me know who I am talking about, for the rest of u I will refer u to one name....Candace.....it's unbelieveable how I keep falling for the same shit over and over and over. Maybe they are right when they say love makes you stupid, and no matter how badly she treats me I keep coming back to her when she beckons me. I cant seem to find a way to get away....I love Her so much though....no matter what anyone says...it just doesnt make an impact. Like today for instance....she got really sick and I spent a great amount of time taking care of her.......She's one of my best friends and I'm in love with her......wtf!?

In the latter months of 2005, the Journal of Religion & Society published a cross-national study comparing the moral behavior of societies to the extent of their religiosity. Data from eighteen developed nations were studied, and although its author did not claim that the results were definitive, the evidence strongly debunks the view that religious belief is a necessary condition for morality within a society. In fact, just the opposite seems to be true. Among the eighteen nations studied, “the United States is the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity [which is] otherwise limited to the second and third worlds.”

This study shows that, “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 developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so. . . . The view of the U.S. as a ‘shining city on the hill’ to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. . . . The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

These results could have been, and perhaps were, anticipated. Religiosity involves a mindset that goes far beyond a mere belief in God. Some characteristics of that mindset are a belief that absolute truth is already known, having been revealed in divinely inspired scripture, and that all that happens happens in accordance with God’s plan. So investigations done in accordance with the principles of problem solving developed by scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians are irrelevant and any evidence so gathered can be ignored. Prayer for God’s help trumps humanistic attempts to make the world better. Whereas non-religious, secular, societies, lacking a belief that the absolute truth is already known, can rely on investigation and the evidence it produces and apply the knowledge discovered in attempts to solve their social problems.

Of course, these findings also refute the view that the behavior of people can be altered by a fear of punishment. If the threat of eternal damnation doesn’t motivate people to act morally, how can one expect threats of legal punishment do so? But if the threat of punishment cannot be relied upon to constrain immorality, then our entire legal system is founded on a false belief. A plethora of studies can be cited that also support this conclusion; yet people persist in believing that punishment is the answer to immoral and criminal behavior. In a rationally oriented society, the results of policies and programs are evaluated in light of the evidence and abandoned when they do not work; in a religiously oriented society, they are not. And so Americans persist in supporting failed policies, squandering resources without achieving any benefit whatsoever.

Until I read this study, I believed that even though religiosity was not an efficient motivator of human behavior, its existence was relatively benign, especially since it apparently helped so many people get through malicious and calamitous events in their lives. That belief now seems to have been misguided, for if religiosity promotes malicious behavior, it is itself malicious and not benign. So perhaps the current spate of books attacking religion and promoting atheism are more than a mere manifestation of a reaction to the influence of fundamental Christianity on the American politic. Perhaps the debunking of religion is the only hope of reforming America and stemming its decline.