I'm not sure about Paul's article either. I'll need to spend some quiet time with it, but I think varkam was more interested in promoting a discussion about the positive aspects of religion on society vs the negative aspects, and does hyper-religiosity lead to negative outcomes for a society?

And a belated welcome to all our visitors from Digg!  

I believe I'd made the point about the non-causal nature of correlational data. In addition, Paul seems to be careful about not using the stats in an irresponsible manner. From paragraph 12:

 Seems to me that he could've done a lot more "damage" if he wanted to.

I just haven't had the time to actually read his article yet, but yes, you were very careful and guarded in your representation of what, if any, conclusions might be drawn from the data.

And thank you again for an thought provoking post. This is why I started this site! 

I tend to agree. I'm a strong atheist but I am really uncomfortable with people like Harris and Dawkins who are attempting to cast religion itself as a mental illness. I know, Dawkins doesn't actually say that but many are interpreting his position in that way. I have not read Harris' book yet so I'll reserve judgment but from what I have read of him, and heard in interviews I think I will find his arguments even more distasteful.

My position is that religion can institutionalize regressive and dangerous behaviors and beliefs but the religious belief alone is not the cause of those behaviors. 

I wouldn't call religion a mental illness per se, however I would say that it causes mental failure.

Religion requires a compartmentalization of thought to enable one to simultaneously believe drastically different or contradictory things. For instance, a man or woman in their daily lives will generally require just as much proof of an amazing claim as any other person would. But when it comes to their religious beliefs... even the most outlandish claims, which are in direct violation of the physical laws of the daily world we live in... and are wholly self-contradictory etc... they take these without question.

This type of cognitive suppression and compartmentalization, which enables them to essentially overcome cognitive dissonance, has numerous ill effects. Its symptoms include such things as a complete inability to even entertain that any notion that in any way conflicts with their religious belief might have any validity. It causes them to oversimplify complex issues that might conflict with their beliefs if studied too deeply. It causes them to treat people of other beliefs as sadly wrong individuals... or to do such things as treat homosexuals as abominations who are going to burn in hell... while usually at the same time being polite to their faces. They don't understand that them telling a person that they're perverse and evil and abominations could have negative repurcussions in that persons life. They believe that God hates gays, so they feel 100% right in sharing that view. They believe that the bible teaches certain things, and therefor they have a right to legislate those particular morals onto everyone else, even when others might not share their personal beliefs.

This type of detachment from reality... and from critical thinking... the oversimplification of issues, the outright willful ignorance of matters that might threaten their beliefs... these things do harm to society. When you have people that willfully make themselves ignorant of scientific facts and medical and scientific progress etc... and practice rote memorization of religious dogma and use it to try to fight scientific progress and hold humanity back as a whole while violating the basic rights of other individuals in society, while being largely painfully ignorant of the facts and complexities of the issues at hand as a result of the very belief system they are trying to maintain... this, as a whole, has a negative effect on society at large.

People unaware of sexual education because of the forced ignorance of the subject, leading to STD transmission and early pregnancies etc... or discrimination against gays because "God says so" rather than any real world reasoning... or teaching bigotry against people of other cultures if they don't share the same beliefs etc, because any other belief must be wrong if it's not Christianity, and other cultures entail different beliefs on non-religious ideas as well... but being different is also seen as dangerous to the conservative status quo in the cultural sense... so you have a general misunderstanding of people like Muslims etc... and rather than addressing the real foundations of the problems with Radical Islam today, you have such ignorant mindsets as that all Muslims are towel headed lunatics who hate life so much that they just want to kill us while they end their own miserable lives out of depression, hatred and jealousy of our Freedom... when this is entirely wrong! This leads us into wars where hundreds of thousands of lives are lost and whole countries descend into turmoil.

People fail to understand that the problems we have with terrorism today are generally the direct result of Religious Fundamentalism... and while this terminology is bandied about as the latest buzzwords... people utterly fail to grasp it's implications. The problem with Religious Fundamentalism is merely in people actually doing what their religion teaches them, even commands them to do! The only reason the rest of the religious aren't following suit is because of a combination of things... failure to understand their own religion fully, and a failure to obey it's teachings. This along with the scientific and cultural secular advances of the past 2,000 years have led to a society, especially here in the U.S., where a majority of people claim to be religious and will steadfastly and vehemently defend their beliefs, but generally have a very poor knowledge of those beliefs and a very poor concept of how those beliefs interact with and even contradict their own daily lives, beliefs and actions. This being another result of the aforementioned compartmentalization of thought that enables them to function from day to day while maintaining a belief system that contradicts the world around them, and the knowledge that enables them to function in it. (dying is bad. if you walk off this bridge, gravity will make you fall and die. certain diseases will kill you. the dead cannot come back to life. etc. bob cannot be 2 places at once. your biological mother cannot be 2 different people. praying will not pay your bills.)

I have seen many times over the results of this compartmentalized mental disconnection from reality... and while many apologists would like us to believe that religion is a good thing, they fail to understand that the kind of "good religion" they're referring to is nothing more than a rather large failure of actually being religious, and mostly following the secular wisdom of the past few thousand years in violation of and in contradiction with the religions they claim to wholeheartedly believe in and steadfastly support. And they do this while denouncing the people on both ends of the spectrum simultaneously... those who are against their beliefs, or do not believe them at all.... and those who share their beliefs, but believe them 100% and obey them in accordance with that belief.

How hard is it to understand that there is a problem when the only way your beliefs are a good thing is when you don't really believe them or follow them fully? And how can you claim their infallibility while at the same time saying that some of them are not relevant or don't need to be followed? (hint: the compartmentalization I talked about earlier). How can you say that Gods word is infallible and must be obeyed, but then ignore all the things he absolutely commands you to do? How can you claim someone is evil or wrong and justify retribution toward or denigration of such people, when you yourself invalidate the very words you claim as your authority? compartmentalization of thought... willful blindness of contradictions... willful ignorance of complex situations... refusal to even acknowledge any error in logic relating to your beliefs.

I could go on and on about this... but I'm not the best writer by any means, and I would hope that my explantion so far has shed a little light on this.

And that's very similar to my thinking on religion. The religious belief itself I think may be an artifact of normal brain functioning that some of us learn to work around. At least those are the assumptions I have right now. That may changed in the future.

I suppose that I should clarify something...
When I stated that "This type of cognitive suppression and compartmentalization, which enables them to essentially overcome cognitive dissonance, has numerous ill effects.", I should have clarified that the real danger with this is the fact that this same set of mental self-induced disabilities and disfuntions follows through into their daily life... so that when faced with real life cognitive dissonance, they resolve it internally in the same manner. They ignore contradictions, they willfully maintain ignorance of ideas and knowledge that might contradict their preconceptions... and while these are all traits we somewhat share... they are also much more likely to simply completely fail to see even the most obvious contradictions, or to be able to use any real level of critical thinking skills or logical reasoning ability etc.

As these self-induced shortcomings spill over into their daily lives, this is when the damage really starts being done. At this point it is no longer simply a harmless fantasy that affects nobody but themselves, at this point they are failing to understand the world around them and using their own self-induced ignorance of concepts and it's resulting painfully flawed understanding of the world as motivations to force their beliefs onto other people by passing laws against them, or supporting wars against them, or simply spreading hate about them, while completely failing to see what they're doing for what it really is. They see what they're doing as perfectly right and perfectly good as extensions of God's perfect will.

If these types of people really did just have a fantasy that harmed noone but themselves, I wouldn't really care... I'd have little problem letting them run around and spend their lives as simpletons. I'd just pity them a bit and ignore them. But when we have them directing national policy and law because of their ignorance en masse... and when my life is personally detrimentally effected by their disassociation with reality and inability to think rationally etc... I have a problem with it.

Although Jefferson made his comment about it neither picking his pocket or breaking his leg... I think even Jefferson would understand that egregious violations of personal freedom in the name of religion is just as heinous... if not even more so.

Are you trying to say fire and brimstone is going to rain over the US? SHIT fucking god

Reasons for not stealing are obvious. The risk far outweighs the benifit of the item stolen. I don't want to go to jail. Morals have nothing to do with it.

Why pornography is moraly wrong I will never understand, how is watching sex worse than participating in it?

Morals are based on the law, not vice versa, and you cant find morality on a scientific table because morality is an abstract concept that varies with culture.

I hope I have made it clear enough for you.

So per your logic, in the absence of a law prohibiting theft - then theft is justified?

That's an interesting viewpoint, although a viewpoint I suspect you would abandon if you were a) a property owner, and b) someone shows up to take your property by force, as there is no law that prohibits theft.

The fundamental basis of any cohesive and properous society is one of property rights - the original definition of the word "gentleman" was "property owner". 

Without property rights, and the respect for other's property, civilized society unravels into chaos.

To make current legal statutes and laws the basis for human behavior subjects you to the whim and fancy of lawyers and politicians.

Swedish teens hump like bunnies, and drink like mad ( it's legal there ), the drug laws are more liberal, etc. Of course, they get a USEFUL safe sex education compared to what US teens get from schools, or their puritanical parents. Scaring kids to keep them in line only works till they get to college. By then they better have the info needed to make informed choices, and mitigate the risks.

And their murder rate, and STD rate is WAY lower than the US'. So the two don't correlate. Germany is way more 'hardcore' in a lot of ways than the US, with porn on tv, mags everywhere, and free drinking. And their homocide rate is way lower as well.

Now, we can argue that any of these are obviously 'worse' than skin being shown in a A&F ad, so why aren't they wallowing cesspolls of societal collapse compared to the US? I'm not talking about the potential collapse of the german nanny state. But according to christian fundies here, that kind of behaviour should have turned Bonn into a thunderdome full of sex crazed drug fueled gangs by now.

I've posted in a previous entry that I think that once you accept a hypothesis, anything can be interpreted to support it's conclusion. I take that to mean that, going a step further with belief, if you believe something, with every fiber of your being, then you're just being intellectually dishonest.

 I know I've fallen into the trap myself at times - it's easy to do. At the heart of it is the presumption that "I'm right and you're wrong, regardless of what the evidence is". I completely agree with you that people need to be open-minded and continue to challenge themselves regarding their beliefs. Like you said, once you make your claims immune to criticism, then you're not all about discovering truth - you're all about protecting your own world-view.

I think the key here is evidence, at least it is for me. It may be true that I don't believe in God and that I do believe in evolution, but that's only a result of the evidence that I have come across in my life. It may, in fact, be true that God does exist and evolution is a fairy tale - I simply don't know. I may be the one of the few people around who does not think the phase "agnostic atheist / theist" is an oxymoron. Epistemic certainty is a rare thing, indeed. 

Though I don't think it's the believing really, really strongly part that's the problem but the refusal to consider evidence to the contrary. And you're right that it's an easy thing to do. I've done it too, I think everyone has at one time or another. I think the useful question to ask is what is it about those of us who have worked themselves out of that trap of believing in something despite evidence to the contrary that makes us different than those who aren't able to do so.

Even though the correlational test does not show causality, i.e. we can't prove that lots of religiosity in a country causes high incidences of STDs, is it still proof that high religiosity does not stop the high STD incidence?

Is the argument "a prosperous society with high levels of religious belief is not helped by their beliefs when tackling STDs, murder rates etc" supported by Paul's data? Maybe this is the more robust defense against religious puritanism from an atheist standpoint...

Actually the study if you clink the link and review the data is flawed in two areas in just the first little bit

Mistake one directly from the study

Homicide is the best indicator of societal violence because of the extremity of the act and its unique contribution to levels of societal fear, plus the relatively reliable nature of the data (Beeghley; Neapoletan).

Youth suicide (WHO) was examined in order to avoid cultural issues related to age and terminal illness.

 Data on STDs, teen pregnancy and birth (Panchaud et al.; Singh and Darroch) were accepted only if the compilers concluded that they were not seriously underreported, except for the U.S. where under reporting does not exaggerate disparities with the other developed democracies because they would only close the gaps. Teen pregnancy was examined in a young age class in which marriage is infrequent. Abortion data (Panchaud et al.) was accepted only from those nations in which it is as approximately legal and available as in the U.S. In order to minimize age related factors, rates of dysfunction were plotted within youth cohorts when possible

Sorry but homicide is not a reliable indicator of the total violent crime rate:  You are more likely to get murdered in the US but you are less likely to be the victim of a violent crime overall (assault, rape, mugging, sexual assault).

The data and studies on that are pretty conclusive and have been replicated by European, British, US studies and surveys including the International Crime Victim Survey ongoing since the 80's.

Similar problem with both the youth study for pregnancy and suicide that ought to be self evident.

and the crowning reason why as an engineer I'm always suspicious of studies from the "soft sciences"

Directly from the study when discussing methodology:

Regression analyses were not executed because of the high variability of degree of correlation, because potential causal factors for rates of societal function are complex, and because it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions.

 Nor were multivariate analyses used because they risk manipulating the data to produce errant or desired results,<5> and

 because the fairly consistent characteristics of the sample automatically minimizes the need to correct for external multiple factors (see further discussion below). Therefore correlations of raw data are used for this initial examination

The above last statement pretty much invalidates it from taking any sort of useful conclusion since it's prey to the casualty fallacy:

More people die in hospitals then the general population therefore hospitals kill people.

The whole point of NOT purely relying on raw data and using either a multivariate or regressive analysis is to avoid the above scenario

Junk science.  You'd be fired in the hard sciences for coming up or trying to derive a conclusion from a "study" like this.

Sorry about the bold underline underneath the last statement didn't know how to turn it off but junk science irks me.

Even in the quote that you pulled, that this study is merely an intial examination. Paul doesn't try to derive any sweeping conclusions or generalizations from the data analysis that he did, only that there is a correlation. The study is merely exploratory in nature, and it is the largest study to date conducted on the topic.

 Furthermore, from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports for January - June 2005, it would appear that one is actually more likely to be the victim of violent crime other than homicide rather than to be a homicide victim given that the number of victims for other violent crime. Perhaps you meant to say the opposite of what you wrote? Or I may be misunderstanding your claim that people are more likely to be murdered than to be victims of violent crime in the US. If I am, please correct me.

"And why would I care about the progress of society if within a couple decades I’ll have no part in it?"

There is the ideal of being a good person for the sake of being a good person, rather than relying on being rewarded by a deity (i.e. eternal life) or to be saved from the threat of 'hell'.

One could argue that just "being good" because it will enable you to go to heaven (or to avoid hell) is not altruism, since it is simply "being good" under coercion from another being.

vegetarians are evil and responsible for the killing of many people. Or perhaps you could blame the deaths of many more people on people with moustaches.

Communism in its worst incarnations were driven by a mixture of all sorts: the cult of personality; a dodgy sense of economics; a sense that people were expendable as long as the state became industrialised; the notion that freedom be curtailed so that everyone accept Marxist-Leninist doctrine (and its variants) to heart.

It is true that Communist régimes strongly favoured atheism, but I don't think this in itself caused the deaths of 100 millions of people. Authoritarian régimes remain suspicious of all potentially divergent forms of authority, and there is a natural hostility to religion since its authority tends to lie out of the state's hands. However Communist régimes as well as other forms of authoritarianism did court religion when it was to their advantage. During WW2, Stalin promoted the Orthodox Church as a symbol of Mother Russia, and admired the hold it had over many people. The Orthodox Church was less important after the war but it was not banned outright, and was kept under a watchful eye by Kremlin informants.

Going back to an earlier point: When people died at the hand's of the communist state, it was usually very unlikely due to their religious belief system, it was because the state saw them as counter-revolutionary (Communists like to use this term to label any political enemy), or an aggressor from another nation, or just simply due to severe economic and social mismanagement. This isn’t so different to those who were killed by the hands of a religious state. There are crimes against humanity that are done for different reasons: God, pride, ideology, greed, racialism. The victims of Communism were not victims of atheism, the Communists did not kill one because one was a theist, but for other reasons which I’ve mentioned.

Is it a common occurance that atheists kill theists because they're theists and/or refuse to "convert" to atheism? I've not heard of that happening but I know of many examples when the reverse is true.