Does Religion do more harm than Good? by Gwynne Dyer
Does religion do more harm than good?
By GWYNNE DYER
LONDON -- In an opinion poll published in Britain recently, 82 percent of the people polled said that they thought religion does more harm than good. My first reaction, I must admit, was to think: That's what they would say, isn't it? It's not just that suicide bombers give religion a bad name. In "post-Christian Britain," only 33 percent of the population identify themselves as "a religious person," and if you stripped out recent immigrants -- Polish Catholics, West Indian Protestants, Pakistani Muslims, Indian Hindus -- then the number would be even lower.
So that's what the British would say, isn't it? In the United States, where over 85 percent of people describe themselves as religious believers, the answer would surely be different, as it would be in Iran or Mexico. But then I remembered an article that was published a couple of years ago in the Journal of Religion and Society titled "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look," in which Gregory Paul set out to test the assertion that religion makes people behave better.
If that is true, then the U.S. should be heaven on earth, whereas Britain would be overrun with crime, sexual misbehavior and the like. Paul examined the data from 18 developed countries, and found just the opposite: "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, (venereal disease), teen pregnancy, and abortion," while "none of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."
How interesting. Now, to be fair, only one of the 18 countries examined (Japan) was not Christian or "post-Christian," so maybe this just shows that high levels of Christian belief correlate with a variety of social ills. There's really no way of testing that anyway, since apart from the countries of East Asia there really are no non-Christian countries where the level of religious belief has yet fallen below 60 or 70 percent.
There's not even any way of knowing if other religions will eventually experience the same decline in belief as the people who believed in them get richer, more urban and better educated. Even in what used to be Christendom, the U.S. didn't follow that path, after all. But the question is not whether religion will continue to flourish. It is whether that makes people behave better, and the data say no.
Even within the U.S., Paul reported, "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, sexually transmitted disease, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast, where societal conditions, secularization and acceptance of evolution approach European norms."
As the most religious country of the 18 surveyed, the U.S. also comes in with the highest rates for teen pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis. (A sidelight: boys who participate in sexual abstinence programs are more likely to get their partners pregnant, presumably because they are in denial about what they are doing.)
What are we to make of this? I never thought that religion really made people behave any better, but apart from the occasional pogrom or religious war it hadn't occurred to me that it would actually make them behave worse. But there may be a clue in the fact that the more religious a country is, the smaller the resources that it puts into social spending, perhaps on the assumption that God will provide.
There is a very strong linkage between how secular a country is and how much it spends on social welfare and income redistribution. There is an equally strong correlation between high levels of social spending and a good score in Paul's survey -- which makes sense, because all the ills he was measuring, from homicide to high infant mortality to teen pregnancy, are far more likely to affect the poor than the rich.
It's not that religious people choose to do bad things more often -- indeed, they are probably more likely to get involved in charitable activities. Maybe it's just that when they talk about transforming people's lives, they don't think in terms of big state-run systems -- and if you don't, lots of people fall through the cracks. Whereas the godless, all alone under the empty sky, decide that they must band together and help one another through large amounts of social spending, because nobody else is going to do it for them.
Or maybe there is some other reason entirely, but the numbers don't lie: The more religious a country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn't do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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Comments
Is religion the cause?
I am always cautious about any article that tries to broadly blame the woes of society on a single cause, such as religion. Is it really a cause/effect? Or are there other underlying causes? Or is it a combination of causes?
For example, how does consumerism fit in? When a culture is inundated with an onslaught of commercials telling its inhabitants that they are not pretty enough, they don't smell good enough, they look old, life is better when you're drinking beer, and how much money you have to spend to fix all your problems with their products, then we can't expect a sense of well-being among its people. The message is "You're worth it!" Spend money on yourself! And the poor go unnoticed as governments try to keep big buisness happy, and as they go off to war to protect their profits and resources.
The message of many religions includes clear demands to take care of the poor, widows, and orphans; to be caretakers of the earth; to be peacemakers; etc, and Christianity is not exempted from these commands.
Perhaps, rather than assuming that religion causes the harm, we should be encouraging the religious to re-examine their priorities when it comes to following their scriptural commands to contribute to a peaceful, environmentally sound, honest, and well-adjusted society. This would be more beneficial to a nation and a government than the alienation of the religious by turning them off with generalized statements like "religion may be harmful".
Alina Abbott
Candidate nominee
Chatham-Kent-Essex
Tolerance and religion
I wonder if the moral supremacy exhibited by many religeous people is linked to the lack of social welfare systems in religious countries. Abortion, drug abuse, prostitution etc may be considered 'morally repugnant' by many religious people, and they may be hesitant to give their taxpayer dollars into the hands of such types of people. Non-religious people may be less inclined to pass judgement, and examine situations more logically without looking at the world through the coloured lens of religion. Of course there are all kinds of people, including many non-judgemental religious people and many judgemental atheists, but overall I wonder if tolerance of deviant behaviour is the underlying theme linking religiousness and lack of social welfare. Most religions are supposed to preach tolerance, but in practice this is not always the case.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an education system in Canada that prohibits segregation (ie- religious schools would no longer be permitted) and promotes understanding by including mandatory courses on the religions of the world (including atheism). There is too little understanding of religions and beliefs other than one's own, and that ignorance has the potential to be turned into intolerance and hatred.
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Jay Fitzsimmons
Ottawa-Vanier, ON
Backsliding is demoralizing?
Lambton Kent Middlesex EDA (SW Ontario)
My mother was a minister so I take from her observations that when individuals start to lose confidence in their faith based world view, they are far more likely than individuals who remain strong or who have never believed to abandon the ethical / moral teachings they once held to, or perhaps never internalized.
Particularly when a person is beginning to isolate themself from the community of believers, and before they develop an alternate world view that allows them to function away from that faith community are they likely to go criminal. The person the most at risk appears to be someone who is still pretending to believe, but is not acting on that belief, is immune to the guidance of their faith and has not yet formalized for themself a new codification of ethical principles.
In essence, a political party may be a religion. It promotes a value system and demands that those who support it give at least lip service to those principles. A political party also has those who backslide, because like religion, we see that some have never really adopted its values for themself even if they promote them for others. As with religion, the political backslider may be at risk simply because they are acting out a standard of hypocrisy, giving lip service to values they are not confident of.
Discussion topic...
This was more meant to be a discussion or debate topic, rather than my concern over what i really believe. I think too many people go through life without examining their roots or their future or their childrens future. There is a book by Robert Nozick, called the 'Examined Life'. It is a philosophy primer to help people examine their experiences and values... similarly... Langdon Winner.. 'The whale and the reactor'.
I have also read 'War' by Gwynne Dyer, and it is not a topic i enjoy, but consider it work... and it is very insightful. That is why i listen to him sometimes, even if i don't agree with all his opinions. This was not meant to be a critique of Elizabeth or her beliefs. I have met her, and i believe her to be sincere , honest, straitforward, and someone with complex language, beliefs and emotions, I want her very much to have success in winning as many seats as we can for the green party. Maybe i should not have posted this article. But it is about a bigger topic that many canadians are not aware of, and that is the agenda of some elites to continually take us all to war or conflict, rather than seeking conflict resolution, and solving problems with trade and the universities and recycling. Some of the elites have given little credence to our intelligentsia, and also to our working folk, and have lived off the milk of our labour, without educating us in a delivering freedom inducing way, with a real perspective on the constraints of our life and societies, and a view to healthy participation. The whole idea of the nuclear family is sick, and we need to make it more fertile and mineralized and organic.... have you ever looked at a bottle of baby shampoo (I'm not particularly criticizing Johnson's here, more the other brands) and checked out the additives... Quaternium 15... what the hell is that?
Just saying that we need to somehow create a language that allows us to commincate, engage and get each others attention, without resorting to typical political platitudes or Orwellian Doublespeak. I know that Elizabeth is aware of this problem, and endeavors to avoid it. All of Harper , Baird, Day ,Duceppe suffer from this, and even stepane has his problems with the power constraints of the Commons and tries to feel his way around them, though they try to tarnish his image. Elizabeth does very well and scores strongly. Similarly Jack Layton is also fairly strong.... though his platform is too simplistic and too closed to the actual people if they wish to speak out and debate and discuss...Though i believe him to be a decent and honourable person, as is Stephane, however hamstrung by the machinations and gyrations of the Liberal machine.
Without constraints it is unlikely that anything of any value will ensue
Richard Belshaw
Wellington-Halton Hills EDA
Without constraints it is unlikely that anything of any value will ensue
Math is necessary to fully understand reality.... but it is not sufficient! pick up a 250000 word dictionary preferably oxford, and learn context and generatio
Religion is not what it seems to be
Lambton Kent Middlesex EDA (SW Ontario)
We can never answer the question whether religion does more harm or good until we look at what are the observed parameters of behavior, not of whole societies, but of individuals.
For example, we see some extremely well balanced and ethical people within religion, and we also see within religion people who's behavior causes us to wonder whether religion has caused this bad behaviour, or whether the individual has associated with religion for less than ethical reasons, or might the individual be really trying to correct course.
Religion when it cincentrates a lot of attention on believing the right things to get the ticket to heaven stamped by the religion, instead of discussing ethical requirements and examples of good and bad behavior, should be expected to have very little benefit in terms of improvement in ethical behavior. When religion concentrates on belief systems, and believers start to doubt, they have a long way back to reestablish an ethical base, a view of society and their place in it. They could have learned from religion most of the simple rules, abd hopefully adherence to those rules should carry one along.
THe problem for many in dropping the belief set is that their reason for doing good was too closely tied into consequences within their belief set. Disruption of the belief set sets adrift their reason for ethical behavior. When a very large number of people in a society are shifting gears, losing confidence in that belief set, and have not yet shifted into an ethical mindset that does not depend on that, or any belief set, then society as a whole suffers.
But is it religion causing the problem, or drifting away from religion that causes this?
Practically it does not matter. We as society do not have a choice to make that involves religion and its belief sets. What we do have is a decision to make in terms of educating ourselves in ethical thinking, a matter that is independent of belief set. What society needs to do is prepare people to live ethically regardless of whether they cling to a belief set or not, and leave belief set alone. Leave belief set alone because too many in society will not behave better as a result of a weakening belief set without a strong ethical base for life.
Religion, more harm or more good.
I'm just saying, if it causes one to live in a dreamworld or nirvana hearing 'Godly' voices all the time, and divorces oneself from the people around oneself or from getting help possibly psychiatric and possibly psychological, then it is doing more harm. If it causes one to go on a great personal mission, without funding and without the support of a lot of other well intentioned people willing to take on their share, then it does more harm. If it saves us from a life of slavery, it does more good. If it leads us to a healthy pace of life, with like minded people with common values (though unique and shaded) , but with overall good intentions and a realistic perspective of what we have to do to survive on this planet Earth, and how to have good husbandry of the livestock, plants and animals AND ATMOSPHERE, with a larger picture of the weather and science enough to galvanize our knowledge not just with logic, but also with experience (Bayes Rule, ie prior knowledge domain and history) and foresight (and imagination) and a healthy physical life.... working to bring better quality sustainance of the life , the village, town, society or globally then i'm all for it.
But when it tells us without good reason, that we MUST do such and such, for no return , not even shelter and food and camaraderie....or risk our lives for God or nation then we have to question that. I think even the Mennonites are on the right track to some extent... with thier sustainable and low impact way of life and their attention to healthy fertile soils....there is a sect that believes in University education for the boys and girls.... and that would be a sect that i would like to meet one day.... i believe thier vision is strong, and that what they know and why their forefathers and mothers shunned some of the technology they did is not entirely crazy to me anymore. However i'd rather read 'We want real food' by Graham Harvey than spend my whole life reading just one darn book. I think many other books are inspired too... and when the church is too overrun with men telling women what they must and mustn't do, rather than a harmony balance where its give and take and organic, yet recognizing each of us for our gifts and shoring up our weaknesses through team work.... this takes deep awareness, communication at appropriate ages and insight and psychological work. and intimacy... If aliens have visited planet Earth.... most people are not aware of their intrustions, but even if it is just in the mind field, i believe they have and are leaving some kind of cognitive space and time..... We just have to figure out how to tune into this universal music and find our role to play with our families and friends and extended social groups. Thats what i believe at the moment.... it might be different tomorrow... though threads continue and get revisited, or investigated further when the time is ripe and ready.... and depending on who i meet from day to day, trying to minimize their pains and mine over longer periods of time, while accomplishing something profound and productive in the mean time. Those are my basic ethics... be decent, help out and be wary of bizarre strangers... however i think a group also should not completely cut itself off from the world, but should stay aware of what the other influential groups out their are doing and behaving and believing or indulging in.....
Without constraints it is unlikely that anything of any value will ensue
Richard Belshaw
Wellington-Halton Hills EDA
Without constraints it is unlikely that anything of any value will ensue
Math is necessary to fully understand reality.... but it is not sufficient! pick up a 250000 word dictionary preferably oxford, and learn context and generatio
The Effects of Religion
If a religion is true it will do more good than harm. If a religion is false it will do more harm than good. There can be more than one true religion, and more than one false one. But all of us have a conscience.
I think at issue is not
I think at issue is not religion so much as those who follow it. I find that the most ardent followers of religion use religion as a way to feel better about themselves, and to feel superiority over others. For instance, look at the actions of the evangelical Christians in the United States who stomp out science in the name of the Lord. God gave us a mind so that we can think with reason, however these people use their groupthink to punish those who dare to question their point of view. Why are religions not focused on bringing people together in peace and to explore the intricacies of our world? I do not think the religion is inherently bad, it is the people who chose to let others think for them that turn it in that direction.
Leave religion out of the discussion and discuss ethics
Lambton Kent Middlesex EDA (SW Ontario)
If we discuss ethics, without reference to belief, most people will be pretty much agreed, although some will insist on rules based in religion that have little to do with ethics. We need not attempt to undo belief to come to agrement on ethics. Rather, the attempt to unseat belief will itself b e an impediment in our attempt to find agreement on ethics. Discussion of belief is a diversion we have no prospect of winning, but is also not a needed win at a political level.
If you want to take it on personally, to disabuse believers of their belief, try keeping the endless debate out of the party.
A matter of faith
I think what people must realize here is that religion brings a sense of moral comfort to billions of people in the world and that the only thing that matters is that people find comfort. Never mind the distortions and the crack-pots and the truly evil people who use religion as a tool for politics and power acquisition. It's about comfort in the grind of daily life. If someone can sit at the end of a day where he/she has seen their crops devastated or someone die or someone lose their job or someone suffer an illness or whatever and, in spite of all of these misfortunes, they can still find a way to see a sense of purpose in life and, yes, even a sense of peace, does it really matter that religion can sometimes be abused? Faith is important to the world.
Joel Parkes
Peterborough Green Party Candidate