Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Two fine authors, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have written recent books, The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell arguing against religion. Their views are based on contemporary science. But the largest convictions of contemporary science remain based on reductionism.

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Christians tend to believe that believing matters quite a bit. In fact, they have a tendency to announce how very much their beliefs influence their behaviour for the better. A classic argument against atheism suggest that, if the atheist is wrong, then there will be hell to pay, but if the christian is wrong, it is no big deal. The atheist will have ruined his afterlife, but the christian won't have ruined anything.

Wrong!

There is quite a bit wrong with this argument. If the atheist is wrong, then there will be a need for the Christian god to explain why his message was so muddled that no rational person could possibly comprehend it. However, if the christian is wrong, then they will have completely ruined there only life, as well as the lives of their children and many of those around them.

What am I? I am the Rational Response Squad. I think like every Rational Responder, because I utilize, well, rational thought. Just like every Rational Responder, I have chosen to reject the backwards, superstitious ideas which are irrational. As with every other Rational Responder, I have rejected the common values of Christianity, and have embraced a new way of thinking. This rejection to which we have committed ourselves to embodies a thought that, more or less, follows the rational skepticism in the bible. For this reason, I have included a synopsis of the bible, in my own words, but in our own thoughts. (Let it be known that the most irrational points in the synopsis below have been numbered to let theists ponder on these irrationalities.)

There are, like, two churches of atheism here in Texas that I know of. I have often considered this to be rather absurd. I mean, what would a preacher of atheism have to preach on? Is there a holy textbook telling what the nongod dictates to the unbeliever?

However, I do understand a certain amount of the reasoning behind opening a church of atheism. The general populace of the United States seems to hold that only those who adhere to some sort of religion have rights in the US. They then state that everyone must believe in some sort of "higher power". They then afford no legitimacy to those things spoken by someone who does not profess some sort of religious belief.

I have never really thought about it until I really read and heard a lot of what Richard Dawkins has to say. Crazy how that happens... it takes someone else to make me see things a different way.

I was watching a video of a question-answer session he had on Youtube the other day which really got me thinking. He stated in there (somewhere) that atheists are really one of the last major groups in the United States still facing serious discrimination and degradation due to their beliefs or lack thereof. The really sad part of that sentence is that to be an atheist in this country means that you must be "in the closet" in a lot of respects.

Humans generally consider humans to be rather intelligent, at least by human standards. This is primarily because the standard is set by humans.

Looking at this, we can see that computers were designed by our human intelligence. All computers that are manufactured and marketed by a company run by humans tend to process data in exactly the same fashion. This enables us to create programs that work the same on all systems.

Looking at humans, however, we find that all humans do not process information the same way. Many cannot even follow simple directions on the highway. There is a great deal of diversity in the way that humans think about things, and many different ways of interpreting data.

This video picks up the account of Human evolution with Homo habilis, the earliest currently accepted member of our genus and describes the similarities and differences between this form and the Australopithecines. It then continues with discussion and demonstration of the features of the African Homo erectus and the Asian forms including the material from Java and from China. In terms of hominid development in Europe, maps and slides are used to discuss the possible new very early hominids from Spain at Orche and the material from Atapuerca. Several different theoretical positions about what to call the European material are presented and the casts of several are discussed in detail. As we move on to the Neandertals the Out of African and Multiregional theories are presented with supporting data and criticisms of each. A cast of the new Solo skull from Polowayo in Java is discussed The Near Eastern material on neandertals and early modern Homo sapiens is covered and the spread of early moderns across Europe and Asia. The video ends not with conclusions, but with questions about interpretation of fossils and the differing theories about the development of modern forms