Rare Common Sense: September 2005 Archives

Fresh research has demonstrated that, contrary to the claims of religious organisations and individuals, religion has a negative effect on society.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its spiritual capital. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

Gregory Paul's research has been published in Journal of Religion and Society, and draws from data collected by Gallup, the International Social Survey Programme and other sources. He compared the rates of murder, abortion and sexually-transmitted infections in several prosperous democracies.

The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested...

...[Paul said} The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.

The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'—The Times, 27th September 2005.

Australia: Probably the best thing about writing for the Prattle is the joy of coming up with titles worthy of the Weekly World News. If only I could wangle aliens or Elvis in there, I'd probably be seeing a lawsuit for treading on their toes.

This particular tale is about James Fletcher, a former Catholic priest in the Hunter Valley parish. He liked to get quite familiar with his altar boys. Fortunately, some of those kids has the guts to face up to the kind of scum in the upper echelon of the Catholic church, who coddled the paedophiles in their midst and bad-mouthed or paid-off their victims, and the good Father found himself sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in stir.