Lennon already wrote that song.  And it's a wonderful song.

Sure, there's still lots of things to disagree on that are perfectly rational and well reasoned on both sides.

 yeah qbg , untill I get what I want , me GOD !    and I want it now .....

Ah.  Nothing like a smelly dead horse to get my Sunday started.

As with all questions, there are opinions and there are answers.  I'm going to try to help put a couple of answers out there to save a few people from their own opinions.  First, atheists as a whole cannot possibly be just as dogmatic as Christians, for two very good reasons:

1) 'Atheists' is not an organized group with a shared purpose.  It is simply everyone who doesn't share a theist purpose.  To put it another way, saying atheists are as dogmatic as Christians is like saying, "Every fruit that isn't a lemon is an orange."

2) Christianity, and specifically fundamentalist Christianity, has been correlated with authoritarianism, and very strongly at that.  Additionally, authoritarianism shows every sign of being a state, not a choice.  From what we know of the power of imprinting between the ages of 3 and 12, and from what we see in other animals who imprint, we have every reason to believe this is so.  The flip side of that is that atheists and people who identify as non-religious but spiritual, etc, correlate very strongly towards non-authoritarianism.  The very nature of nonauthoritarianism is emphasis on bilateralism, relativism, and independence of the individual.  So, we run into an interesting problem...

Here's the reality of the way humanity is made up.  Authoritarianism is not something that can be eradicated.  If you installed a dictator who rounded up every authoritarian in the world and committed a genocide that would make Hitler look like a nice guy, the very next generation would have people prone to authoritarianism.  We're prone to it because we evolved to stratify ourselves culturally.  (Oh, and that dictator would have to kill himself after the genocide was through...)

So, even though he's right for all the wrong reasons (which I will get to), jmm is correct.  Without religion, people would still do a lot of stupid shit.  The Chairman Mao's of the world would still create things like the Great Leap Forward, and the Bushes of the world would still sell people on things like No Child Left Behind.  We would still have great pockets of ignorance, and politically shrewd power-mongers would still know that cultural ignorance is the easiest way to maintain a docile population.

Now, jmm, I'll be honest with you.  I have always thought you had a chance to become a good thinker, but lately, I don't think you will.  Your opinions seem to be going farther away from the reality of a natural universe and the existence of objective answers to questions.  This quote is actually pretty insulting.  After as long as you've been here, for you to toe the party line and say that atheism is ideology?  You're not ignorant.  I know you've read enough threads to see the logic.  There are only a couple of other options besides ignorant, and I don't like either for you.

Atheism is a non position.  It cannot be an ideology because it doesn't hold anything in particular to be true.  You can be an atheist and believe in space aliens who seeded life on earth.  You can believe in reincarnation.  You can be a communist, a capitalist, a hippie.  You can live in a Kibbutz or a commune or New York.  The only thing you can't be is someone who believes in a being called "God."

So, jmm, you are wrong even while you are right.  The world without religion would still have war and people would still violate human rights on massive scales, and there would still be third world countries, and we probably would still kill ourselves off in a few hundred years of environmental destruction.  However, you are wrong that the world wouldn't be any better at all, and that's the whole point of what we're doing.

Right now, there are millions of people who live according to stupid dogmatic rules made up by Bronze Age men.  I, for one, would prefer it if these millions of people were happier.  In America and other countries, we have tons of laws based on religion.  We have billions of dollars funding religious organizations, and none of it is taxed.  (The government, corrupt as it is, could sure use some extra money.)

Ending religion would not solve all of humanity's problems, but it would most definitely solve many of them.  As I've said before, when you take "Faith is a Virtue" out of the equation, and at least force people to offer some kind of rational justification for their laws and such, you cannot help but improve the quality of the answers you get when you ask questions.

Your cop-out answer is the equivalent of saying, "Well, we're all going to die eventually anyway, so I don't see any reason why we should choose fresh food over old, rotted food."  Yeah, people are still people, but I choose the 'poison' of giving them the best chance of doing the rational thing.

Lastly, who the fuck said anything about militant atheist rule?  You're saying that if the majority of the world stopped being religious that suddenly the world would be ruled by militant atheists?  Seriously, dude.  You need to stop reading religious tracts.

 

You see, this is one of the gaps between theists and atheists.  Since theism and faith are "all-or-nothing" propositions, theists believe that their own style of thinking is the only way things can be thought.  Your fundamental misunderstanding of my statement is evidence of this.

First, I do not claim to hold the answers to all of life's mysteries.  I do, however, have areas of expertise in which I do know answers.  To go from, "I know the answer to this question" to "I know the answer to all questions" is pretty silly, wouldn't you say?  I don't know a damn thing about many subjects, and you'll notice that I don't weigh in on them when they're brought up.

To the questions about human nature, I do know many of the answers.  Like any scientist, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong, but when the evidence is overwhelming, we must proceed as if we have the correct answers.

What makes me sad is that you spend so much time hating something that you don't even comprehend.

You remember the all-or-nothing thinking I was just getting onto you about?  Here it is again.  RRS is a group of atheists who are united in a particular goal.  We do not speak for all of the atheists in the world.  We only speak for those who agree with us.  If you haven't noticed, there are a lot of atheists who disagree.

Again, you have no justification for using us as representative of atheism.  We can only represent ourselves, and we are only a small percentage of the world's atheists.

So, you admit that you know we don't represent all atheists, but you still claim that we do.  Nice.

We are an organized group with a shared purpose.  When have we denied this?  This has absolutely nothing to do with the assertion that atheism itself is evangelical in nature.  Clearly, it is not, or else there would be an awful lot more organizations like RRS.  Furthermore, and this is a really important distinction, RRS's purpose is not atheism's purpose, for atheism, as I've explained already, has no purpose.  We are atheists with a purpose, not atheism's purpose.  That's really important.

Let's talk about evangelism for a second.  In the entire world, I'd bet there are a couple hundred "evangelical atheist" groups of any significant size.  I've never seen a late night TV show advocating atheism.  I've only seen one or two atheist bulletin boards in my life, and RRS affiliates were behind those.  I've never seen a street preacher advocating atheism.  I've never heard of a record company devoted to spreading the good news of atheism.

Atheists are either the third or fourth largest group on the planet, depending on who you believe.  There are millions of churches and other religious establishments specifically for the purpose of spreading theism.  Proportionally, just making a roundabout guess, I'd say that a 3:1 ratio of the population (3 theists to 1 atheist) correlates to approximately 500,000:1 evangelical activities.  To say that atheists are inherently evangelical is so absurd as to border on complete lunacy.

That would be a fruitless discussion, since I don't claim that authoritarianism is rooted in theism.  I claim that theism is rooted in authoritarianism.  For that proposition, it really wouldn't involve going around in circles.  It would be me spending about two hours typing out the virtually incontrovertible data, gathered over the last 40 years, across cultures, that clearly demonstrates the correlation between authoritarianism and theism.  Since authoritarianism is older than theism, there is no question as to which is rooted in which.

You are welcome to object to this, but then, you're also welcome to believe that the moon is made of cream cheese.  Have fun with it.

By pointing out that you've completely misunderstood my point again, else you wouldn't have asked this question, which actually supports my position.

I'm sorry that you don't understand the fallacy.  After this long, I'd think you'd have it.  As I've already explained, the existence of the Bolsheviks, the Red Chinese, Stalin, and any other atheists who committed atrocities supports my position regarding theism being rooted in authoritarianism.  The claim that they were or were not doing something in the name of atheism is not even relevant to the discussion.  I'm sorry you don't understand this, but it's true.

It's odd watching you try so hard to make your brain believe what you want me to be saying even when you're comprehending what I'm actually saying.   No matter how much you understand my point, you can't accept it because your entire rebuttal is based on the belief that I'm saying something entirely different.

Yeah, yeah.  Since we use the word 'eradicate,' it automatically means that we intend to use despotic ideological methods to achieve our ends.  Geez.  It really is amazing how many errors there are in your thinking.  I'm not trying to be mean, but I've kind of left you alone for a while now to see if you were going to work things out on your own.  You're still making the same errors, though.  Indoctrination does run deep.

Once again, let me see if I can make this clear.  Atheism is a lack of ideology.  We do not espouse or advocate any particular replacement for theism.  If there's a big pile of shit in the middle of your kitchen floor, you clean it up and leave the kitchen floor with nothing on it.  This is what we're trying to do.  Remove something negative from human culture.  That's it. 

Again, we're talking about equivocation and evidence.  When I say, "This is true," it means something different than when a theist says it.  I mean that there is overwhelming empirical evidence such that we can say it is true in the inductive scientific sense.  This kind of assertion may be refuted, but not by simply pointing out that it might not be true.

With any of my statements, you are free to find empirical evidence that I am wrong.  If you do, and it checks out, I'll change my tune.  Until then, doing the whole "You used the word true, so it's an ideology" won't fly.  It may convince you, but it's not philosophically or logically sound.

I'm not going to bother with this again.  I'm so damn tired of this that I'm just not going to deal with it.  Again, your rejection of the logical and philosophical parsimony in my explanation of atheism in no way influences the correctness of it.

If you've been keeping up with my author section, you should know why this is wrong.  Better and worse are conditionals.  They require something after them in a sentence.  In other words, if I say, "It would be better for you to go to the bathroom before we start driving," I mean, "It would be better for the total time of our trip, since stopping at a service station will take longer than going now," or something similar.  When I say that an individual will be better without theism, I must also have a similar 'goal' to which I'm referring.

It turns out that I do.  Sociobiology, anthropology, and other sciences involved with human culture tell us unequivocally that many practices inherent in theism are correlated with many social ills, and that the correlations are across cultures and individual religions.  With regard to societal dysfunction, the correlation is crystal clear.  (Again, you can produce counter evidence if you'd like, but a layman's uninformed objection is important only to the uninformed layman, not to me.)

The evidence is in, and it demonstrates that secular societies are more functional than religious societies.   Furthermore,  societies that do what we (RRS) advocate, which is egalitarianism combined with  embracing science and freethinking, are really awesome places to live, and they have very high levels of personal satisfaction among the population.  I'm not just making this up.  This is what the data says.

This statement is so broad as to be virtually useless.  Minding one's own business can be good or bad.  If you're getting the shit beat out of you, would you rather I mind my own business or try to help?

Yeah.... sooooo....

We're trying to stop that kind of thing.  You see how it works?  The Christians are beating the shit out of some guy, and we can either pass by or try to help.
 

Seriously, you keep doing this, and it's really annoying.  Have you ever been to Holland?  Virtually a completely secular society, and they don't have any laws outlawing the exercise of religion.

What would possibly make you think that atheists want to cut funding for the arts?!  That's moronic.

The reason you think this is that you still don't have a grasp on the idea of a negative position.  Because you think of society as having to have the equivalent of religion, you can't imagine that it's more akin to a nasty zit.  Once it's gone, you just have skin.  You don't have to replace it with a canker sore.

Yeah.  Why don't you do some research on what militant groups do.  We don't fit the bill at all.

Have you noticed that there aren't many alchemists in the world today?  That's because alchemy doesn't work.  Instead of alchemists, we have scientists.  Notice that there isn't a guild for out of work alchemists?  That's because the art itself died out.   People changed to the better system.

If nobody's buying religion, the clergy would be out of jobs.  I don't want to speak for the OP, but I suspect he isn't laboring under the delusion that all clergymen would become scientists.  Just from what I know of them, I'd wager a guess that there would be a lot more used car salesmen.

I don't care if you go to church.  I also don't care what your family thinks.  I care about your logic, which is fundamentally flawed.

And you don't understand why I want to end theism?  You're the poster child for why I want to end theism.

Thank you.  You know I'm harsh because I care, right?

 

 

 

Still won't help. It's human nature, no religion, they replace it with something else, it's really that simple.

 

Many nations live with high religious populations yet rate high in life style and living conditions.

 

 

Oh Canada...

 

Source:

 

 

a. Religiosity index, by gender, Canada, 2002   Degree of religiosity Low Moderate High Total (0 to 5) (6 to 10) (11 to 13) Percentage Total Men Women

40	31	29	100
481	281	241	100
32	33	35	100
1. Statistically significant difference from reference group in italics, at the 95% confidence level.
Source: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002.

 

 

 

Source

 

. The importance of religion to one's life, by gender, Canada, 2002   Importance of religion to you¹ High Moderate Low No religion Total Percentage Total Men Women

44	20	19	17	100
362	21	232	202	100
51	20	14	15	100
1. Importance of religion to you is scored from 1 (not important at all) to 5 (very important). High importance is defined as a score of four or five, moderate importance — a score of three and low importance — a score of one or two. Those reporting no religious affiliation were not asked this question.
2. Statistically significant difference from reference group in italics, at the 95% confidence level.
Source: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002.

 

e. The importance of religion to one's life, by religious practices, Canada, 2002 Attendance at religious servicesPrivate religious practices Importance of religion to you¹ High Moderate Low No religion Total Percentage

At least monthly	At least monthly	87	11	2	...	100
At least monthly	Infrequently or never	602	272	122	...	100
Infrequently or never	At least monthly	452	362	182	...	100
Infrequently or never	Infrequently or never	152	312	542	...	100
No religion		...	...	...	100	100
1. Importance of religion to you is scored from 1 (not important at all) to 5 (very important). High importance is defined as a score of four or five, moderate importance — a score of three and low importance — a score of one or two. Those reporting no religious affiliation were not asked this question.
2. Statistically significant difference from reference group in italics, at the 95% confidence level.
Source: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002.

 

is 50% of moderate > high religiosity high? It's higher than some countries, but likely dramatically lower than the US.

and less than 30% in the sub 60 category for highly religious folks.

You'll also note that the Canadian born have a much lower religiosity than immigrants.

And we still have issues here in Canada with specific areas of poverty (specifically some of the native tribes).

We have our fair share of religiously supported politicians as well that are very much influenced by their religion but due to split representation their extreme views tend to get buried a bit better than in the US.

 

That said, it can be done with a nation where the politicians believe in secularism.

Yes, sorry,  60%...and age category...sub 60.  The trend for awhile has been religiosity is fading with each generation and it continues to be true.

And not everything is an argument pineapple.  I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you.  I think the US would be a lot less religiously influenced if the electoral system was not broken.

 

 

Now cite your sources.

 

Your sources will do just fine.  Cyprus is an anomaly at 90%/90%, and I would have to see more than just these numbers to know if there was a reasonable explanation for that.  Outside of Cyprus, only Spain and Ireland rate above 50% "Believe in God."  I would note that Ireland has a long history of warfare based on religious affiliation.  Religion is like a political party there, with or without belief in a God.  Spain has a similarly religion-inundated history, where the religion is identified as much with national identity as anything else.  I suspect that careful examination of both of these countries will reveal a confirmation bias, but even so, it looks like there's an average difference of about 45 points more satisfaction than religion. 

I will also note that these countries are all among the most fiscally prosperous nations in the world, with high levels of income and standards of living.

Here's the top ten in standard of living:

Norway

Sweden

Canada

Belgium

Australia

U.S.

Iceland

Netherlands

Japan

Finland

Notice that none of these countries are on the list of high god belief/high satisfaction?  I also note that three of those countries are former Eastern block countries, where most of the population remembers communism.  Why wouldn't they be happy?  We've done this before, comparing statistics, and I honestly don't feel like doing it again.  You're going to use any statistical anomaly you can find to try to prove the point that somewhere in the world, someone is both religious and happy, and I'm going to continue to insist that you're ignoring the massive statistical correlations indicating exactly the opposite.

Also, I did a couple of quick checks of the other criteria that I mentioned:

Cyprus:  GDP>PPP, 103rd of 163 surveyed.

Malta: GDP>PPP 131st.

Romania: GDP>PPP 43rd

Greece: GDP>PPP 38th

 

To contrast:

Netherlands: 18th

Denmark: 31st

UK: 6th

I took the top three closest God/Satisfaction, and the top three with the biggest differential, and guess what?  The countries that believe in God have much lower standards of living, and the ones that don't believe in God have much higher standards of living.  You see, Pineapple, this was why I didn't ask for just one little comparison on something as subjective as "reported happiness" which is what you gave me.  I asked for countries that, just like the least religious countries in the world, have high standards of living, low societal dysfunction, and high levels of satisfaction.

I took a glance over crime, and it looks like the comparison will hold up.  But you know this already.  You've weighed in every time we've presented a new study demonstrating the clear correlation between religiosity and societal ills.  You're just bound and determined that if you can find just one little country that bucks the trend, that the whole trend is wrong.

Have fun with it.  I'm not interested in this game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A follow up article addressing the WHO study:

Recent years have seen increasing recognition paid to the relation of religiousness/spirituality (R/S) to health care and research. This has led to the development of more inclusive and trans-culturally validated measurements of R/S. This paper comments on the WHOQOL SRPB Group's "A cross-cultural study of spirituality, religion, and personal beliefs as components of quality of life" (62: 6, 2005, 1486-1497), a recently published paper in Social Science & Medicine, and illustrates a possible problem in the measurement of R/S, especially as related to the study of mental health outcomes. Some scales have included questions about psychological well-being, satisfaction, connectedness with others, hopefulness, meaning and purpose in life, or altruistic values as part of their measure of R/S. These questions are really tapping indicators of mental health, and should not be included in the definition of R/S itself. Otherwise, tautology is the result, and it should not be surprising that such measures of R/S (defined by questions tapping mental health) are related to mental health outcomes.

I would give more information than the abstract, but that would cost me $31.50 to read it all.  Did you actually read the WHO study or is the abstract, that you cut and pasted, proof enough that your position is correct?  I think most people would appreciate if you would cite sources that you yourself have actually read and are freely available to read.

 

---

 

I don't believe that it can be clearly shown, across completely different cultures and political systems, that religion/belief in god can have an affect on crime/quality of life/prosperity/whatever.  There are just too many other factors that affect these attributes of a nation.  Both sides could go on and on cherry picking the statistical data supporting their side. 

What is interesting for me though, is to look at the political policies that religious groups have advocated (with justification in scripture) in the past as well as presently.  Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supported the invasion into Iraq, are for the death penalty, anti-environmentalist, are against (potentially life saving) stem-cell research.  One thing that I have noticed while growing up in a christian family and later on in life is how Christians in general feel that the answer to crime is to lock the criminals up and throw away the key.  Kind of like an earthly version of Hell when you think about it.  I just read that the U.S. leads the world in the number of prisoners (about 1 in a 100) locked away.  Would things be different if religion never existed?  I don't know, but I believe that religion has repeatedly shown itself to be an enormous hinderance to progress.

 

 

Ah, but the difference is I'm not trying to show Religiousity is correlated with good quality of life. What I did was posted an abstract of a study that goes against Hamby's point. I'll take that study of Hamby any day.

 

Why?

 

Hamby refuses to offer numbers. In stats, in order to show a correlation you have to provide a little something called, you may have heard of it, MATH! No numbers, just X country has Y GDP and Z crime rate. There are simply too many fucking factors that affect GDP, crime rate etc.. and most have nothing to do with Religion. For example, the U.K is an island and has economic ties to France, shipping ports etc, all contribute to a high GDP, exactly how the fuck does religion fit in?

 

If Hamby cares to actually read (or if he has read, understand...) stats books, he would provide numbers, Percentages, rates of growth etc..  and I have a sneaking feeling,  that he most likely doesn't even know what numbers to plug in or how to show a correlation mathematically.

 

For example, he listed the GDPs of Cyprus and looked up the crime rate.

 

I'm pretty sure he looked at the current GDP, or the current crime rate, where as the God stats were from 2005.

 

 

Otherwise pirates and global warming, pepsi sales and murder etc...

 

 

---

 

 

Bingo, Hamby has not provided enough data to show a direct correlation. Nor has he provided any math.

 

 

Like, I said many factors affect crime rates.

 

The reason I said that is because of Hamby's post:

 

 

What particluary pissed me off was the whole 'uninformed layman' bullshit.

 

He has yet to mathematically show the correlation. HE is doing what an uninformed layman would do.

 

 

 

You're right it doesn't, sorry, but I was in pissed mode.

I agree, but we can always challenge what we believe.  If we don't then we are going to live a life of ignorance.

 

System?  Being an atheist means one thing, I don't believe in god[s]. 

 

How about a complete lack of proof! 

 

Being an agnostic atheist, I'll take that as a complement.

 

Is believing in one less god than you really limited their thinking?  The people that are limiting their thinking are the dogmatic theists.  There's no book that I have to listen to that says that I'll burn for eternity for rejecting my beliefs [that I realize are false].

 

Huh?  'refuse to check their work' ? 

 

So the end times are near?  People have been saying this crap for the past two thousand years.  If the end times weren't near, then I think something actually bad might happen.

 

Oh, I think you mean, "What if we became the Tollans?" http://tinyurl.com/3crjvj

 

You might also get a chuckle from F.M. Esfandiary's view, back in 1981, of life in that far-off, future year 2010: "Up-Wing Priorities" http://www.box.net/shared/static/ay9lub60ha.pdf

"Imagine if atheists ruled"

South Park already beat you to the punch.  Atheists certainly are on the right track away from superstition and magic. But even if the majority of the species didn't buy magic boogie men, we would still be divided in terms of "HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM" which for every species, is a battle over resources vs making sure that the benifits for all are maximized and the harm to the least is minimized.

That episode correctly pointed out that even IF the planet were monocromatic in label, divisions and splits would exist, just as they do in Christianity and Islam. I can see that today amongst the PC atheists and the free speech Libertarian atheists who are not PC.

If atheists ruled the same thing will happen, the species will die, not for the magical reasons the theists claim, but it will happen. What humans, dispite their label have the oportunity to do, is to try to extend the ride. I am bias in that atheists can do better than superstition and sky daddies, but we are not any less flesh and bone than a theist.