More bad analysis

Drudge links to a Time of London article that claims:

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...

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 ..

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports... “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD 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.”

Let's play Spot the Fallacies!

First, the Times should try reading the Times, which ran in its Sept. 18th edition an article entitled "Scotland tops world league for violent crime;"

According to the UN study, 3% of Scots had been victims of assault. The second highest figure was recorded in England and Wales at 2.8%, compared with 2% in America and 0.1% in Japan.

Second, American statistics look pretty good if you take out the 27% of the population that is black or Hispanic to make it more racially comparable to Britain's population. Blacks are incarcerated for violent crimes at 7.1 times the non-Hispanic white rate and Hispanics at 3.4 times the white rate. Similarly, blacks have about four times as many abortions and Hispanics about twice as many. All these other measures the article cites are worse among blacks and Hispanics as well.

When you do a direct apples to apples comparison of the white working classes in Britain and America, the Brits appear to be falling apart morally (e.g, drunkeness, assault, and burglary), while the Americans are holding their own. The single most plausible explanation, as I pointed out in VDARE.com earlier this year, is the stronger Christianity of the Americans.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer