Scientific American - Is Religion Good for Society?

I know this is one of our favourite subjects here, so I thought I'd post this article from Scientific American.
Given the subject matter, it's surprisingly brief, mostly (I suspect)
because the research points in all different directions at once:

"independent scholar Gregory S. Paul found an inverse correlation
between religiosity (measured by belief in God, biblical literalism,
and frequency of prayer and service attendance) and societal health
(measured by rates of homicide, childhood mortality, life expectancy,
sexually transmitted diseases, and teen abortions and pregnancies)"

...and then again... "In general, religious people are more than three times more generous
than secularists to all charities, 14 percent more munificent to
nonreligious charities and 57 percent more likely than a secularist to
help a homeless person."

So there you have it: a definite maybe.

Truly Terrifying - Patrick Henry College

I’ve just finished reading a truly terrifying article in this week’s New Scientist. Not the one about Ebola sweeping across Africa. Not the one about why the world’s poor will be the greatest victims of global warming. No. The really scary one is about home schooling. It’s scary because teaching your kids at home is an increasingly popular option in the USA, and it is strongly linked to the aggressive Christian organisations who are successfully lobbying nationwide against evolution and in favour of creationism.

Now I have no wish to upset anyone who might read this, but I absolutely draw the line at creationism, and so-called ‘intelligent design’. There are clearly a lot of very smart people (way smarter than me) who believe in it, but it simply makes my jaw drop that anyone can believe in the literal truth of the Bible. And the idea that the natural world somehow required an intelligent designer leaves me baffled. I regard it as intellectual laziness.

But enough of that - the ins and outs of the scientific debate are not scary. What I find truly scary, though, is the idea of places like Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. It’s a college which requires its students to have a literalist belief in the Bible (even Leviticus? How?), and grooms them to be the next leaders of the country. And it does very well; in 2004, despite only being open for four years, it filled 7 out of the 100 internships in the White House, and provided six interns working for Congress and eight for federal agencies (including two for the FBI). Now this might be a flash in the pan, thanks to the religious fervour of the current incumbent at the White House, but I’m kind of doubting that.

On the other hand, the school clearly provides an excellent liberal arts education (with a strong emphasis on debating and rhetoric). These children are explicitly being groomed to lead the country. What’s wrong with having well-educated, focussed people running the country? Well, apart from the fact that it’s almost always people who are extremely well-educated but extremely narrow-minded that produce the biggest disasters in human history (Nazi Germany being the first example that springs to mind – extremely smart, extremely dogmatic, skilled in rhetoric and propaganda, democratically elected…), apart from that… apart from that, um… actually, do you really need an ‘apart from that’? Isn’t that enough? We’re talking about a group who are taught that global warming isn’t something to worry about because (a) God would never let something like that happen to his creation, or (b) it isn’t happening, or (c) it’s all part of the road to the Rapture, and should be welcomed (and maybe even hurried along a bit). And these are the people we want to lead the world’s only superpower? What makes me truly sick is the certainty that even if they did manage to wreck the world in search of the Apocalypse, and by some miracle we managed to get some precious few rockets off the planet to carry on eking out an existence somewhere else, they’d still find a reason to talk their way on board…