…of the “you’re fulla crap” award is Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent for The Times in the UK!
She’s the undisputed winner with this gem:
‘Societies are worse off when they have God on their side’
Here’s just a little crap sample to wet your whistle:
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
The story Ruth wrote reported strung together is the crapiest of crap. As a matter of fact, it’s so chock-fulla-crap that future crap stringers will be hard pressed to knock ‘ol Ruth off of the crap heap.
Be sure to send her a congratulatory email. Heck, send two, or ten if you want.
Go ahead and send emails of praise to Ruth’s colleagues!
- Editorial Director, The Times and The Sunday Times – online.editor@timesonline.co.uk
- Newsdesk – news@timesonline.co.uk
And be sure that readers of the newspaper Ruth works for hear how proud you are!
- Letters to the Editor – letters@sunday-times.co.uk
Goodonya Ruth!
Sorry silly Pundit Guy, I believe that Ruth is on the right track, please reveiw the following quotation from a different article.
“Large-scale surveys show dramatic declines in religiosity in favor of secularization in the developed democracies. Popular acceptance of evolutionary science correlates negatively with levels of religiosity, and the United States is the only prosperous nation where the majority absolutely believes in a creator and evolutionary science is unpopular. Abundant data is available on rates of societal dysfunction and health in the first world. Cross-national comparisons of highly differing rates of religiosity and societal conditions form a mass epidemiological experiment that can be used to test whether high rates of belief in and worship of a creator are necessary for high levels of social health. Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.”
-Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies, Gregory S. Paul, Baltimore, Maryland
Please try not to delete my comment just because you disagree. My e-mail address is genuine.
Biff
Mark Holmstrand
6250 Tuttle Place #1
Anchorage, AK 99507
(907) 830-0086
The news story misrepresents the study and the study itself is seriously wonky. Details:
http://magicstatistics.blogspot.com/2005/09/
from-our-bulging-how-not-to-do.html
(Pardon the shameless self-promotion.)
By the by, manwith2dogs, your quotation comes from the very study that Ruth Gledhill mangles in her story. Hardly an independent source!
Look, if you read the original study all it really says is that low religiousity levels or high levels of atheism will not lead to social ills. That’s it. It’s not proving anything bad about religion itself because correlation is not causation. The author of the study says as much in the study itself. What it does do is DISprove claims that atheism/secularism is bad for society. Why should it be bad for society? We already know that religiousity has nothing to do with a person’s actual moral behavior. (See Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, Chapter 10.)
I’m not so sure – I think her most recent load-o-crap regarding the Bible and the Catholic Church is crappier than the societal crud you cite.
http://www.blogs4god.com/node/458
Did Catholics boot Biblical Truth – or is the Times Online trolling for cheap hits?
The hierarchy of the British Press has published an article teaching that some forms of religious defamation and theological misinterpretations are actually okay. Religious writers for England, Wales and Scotland are instructing their readers how to driv
Lynne,
Sorry, but you’re wrong about the import of the study. It is so completely–ludicrously–incompetent statistically that it proves and DISproves absolutely nothing. It is, to be blunt, worthless, except perhaps as an example of how not to do statistics. Details here:
http://magicstatistics.blogspot.com/2005/09/from-our-bulging-how-not-to-do.html