Posted on 09/29/2005 3:11:16 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
IS GOD BAD FOR SOCIETY ?
Europeans are much better off than Americans because of their lack of faith.
That's the conclusion of a paper published in the Journal of Religion and Society.
Once, secularists, atheists, agnostics and materialists argued that a society without faith could be as just and moral as one built on the absolute standards of a Judeo-Christian foundation.
Today, as the secular world's war with God rages, they are going further – building a pseudo-scientific case that faithless societies are actually better off.
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a self-proclaimed "social scientist," writes: "Many Americans agree that their church-going nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world. In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD (sexually transmitted disease) infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
He concludes that the evidence accumulated in a number of studies suggests that religion might actually contribute to social ills.
"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," he wrote.
Actually, what Paul is trying to disprove is the dictum of America's Founding Fathers, who understood and explained that the new government they created would only be as strong as the moral fiber of the new nation's people.
As Samuel Adams put it: "Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy, and, in subordination to these great principles, the love of their country; of instructing them in the art of self-government, without which they can never act as a wise part of the government of societies, great or small in short, of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system."
Or, as the prophet Hosea put it: "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children."
I'm not surprised the pseudo-intellectual case is now being laid to persuade the already persuaded that the God of the Bible is dangerous to civil societies.
Forget Baal. Forget the depravities of Rome. Forget the barbarism, human sacrifice and cannibalism of the pagan societies. Forget what happened to the nation of Israel each and every time it turned its back on God. Listen, instead, to Gregory Paul, modern "social scientist."
In the final analysis, there are but two alternative ways of living:
under the authority of God;
under the authority of man.
It was under the authority of God that freedom has occasionally and temporally been known in the world. The social ills we see in America today are the result of the rejection of that authority, particularly in the last 40 years.
The alternative is subjugation of man to the state. Europe is ahead of the U.S. on this road to tyranny, but only by a matter of degree.
In truth, every society serves a god. It can be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or it can be some other god. Even secular humanists have their gods – evolution, the earth, man, to name a few.
I don't need to study statistics to know where I would rather live, given the choice between a community of devout Bible students or a community of atheists.
What about you? Would you rather live in a society shaped by the morality and accountability of the Bible? Or would you prefer to live in a society in which every man does what is right in his own eyes?
Would you honestly prefer to live in an "anything-goes" world, governed only by the sheer terror of the state? Or would you rather live as a free individual in a society of limited government in a moral order, under the central tenets of God's law?
Put it this way... imagine yourself walking towards your car in a darkly lit neighborhood and then encountering a group of 18 to 20 olds coming towards you. Would you be more comfortable knowing that they just came out of a church's Bible Study, or that they just came out from a bar, a club or a strip joint ?
Boy, are they in for a surprise!
Where is there a truly "secular society" to study anyway?
Like the Soviet Union, Peoples Republic of China, and Cuba?
God is good for society. A society of rational people do not require God to have a very high functioning society, but the reality is that most people are irrational imbeciles and if some random belief (irrational or otherwise) keeps them in line then I guess I'll have to take that as the runner-up solution. Systems based on axioms are suboptimal, but hardly worse than societies based on neither rationality nor a vaguely consistent set of axioms.
Maybe in this life...
Nicely said!
My God, Europeans are certainly a fine lot to hold up as a role model for us. And where have the major wars of this world started, almost exclusively?
Europe and Asia are responsible for what 100 million deaths of just their own citizens?
Wow, just damn...
Let me guess, some CYA athiest must have written this.
To be technical those weren't non-religious societies. They had a religion...Marxism.
So dysfunctional we had to rescue their European hides out of two World Wars!
how does your wife feel about that?
Europeans are much better off than Americans because of their lack of faith.
Nazi, communists and maoists are safer than here?
What do you suppose that John Lott would do to the statistics in this "study?"
A dumb 'study'. He just compared the US with Britain and a few other more secular countries and attributed all the differences to the US being Christian. Forget about the race relations and our inner city problems. All ills were simply assumed to be because we are a more Christian society. What a lame 'study'. This 'study' could have been done in a week by one person.
Wishful thinking by doomed agnostics and atheist wannabes.
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