Osler's Razor

Baloney

Did you ever think that people then answered the question, rather than giving the P.C. answer?
 

I really don't know if we are more religious today. Knowing what I know about statistics and historians, those numbers look a little suspect to me. How did Mr. Stark define religious adherence or religion? Those numbers may reflect more of his definitions than devotion to God. Or they may reflect an increase in the ability to record demographics.

Certainly, there weren't any Gallup Polls to assess the percentage of the population that believed in God or attended church regularly. ("Regularly," that's another one of those words subject to many definitions).

But I may be wrong.
 

It is curious that as our nation becomes increasingly more self-identified as "Christian", it corresponds with a comparable increase in the only two reliable measures of criminal activity:
1. The number of people who have been impacted by a crime, either personally or in their immediate family
2. The number of people who are incarcerated at any given time.
A third measure -- the total number of "serious" crimes in a given community (rape, robbery, murder)-- is problematic because each community defines crime different and often reports it differently, usually for political reasons.
So, what does this mean when Christians have a HIGHER divorce rate now than the self-professed non-Christians (or people who are no longer practicing their faith)?
Meanwhile, the number of people who have fallen into the standardizard "poverty" income zones in the past seven to eight years (again, according to the government's own reports) has increased dramatically as well.
So, by those measures at least, the greater percentage of self-identified Christians in recent years doesn't necessarily translate as a good thing for the nation!
RFDIII
 

I would like to know more about Rodney Stark and how he defines religious adherence. I personally think these numbers are inflated or the definition of religious adherance is extremely broad.

I classify myself as Agnostic. I have friends I would classify as Christian Agnostic (they attend religious services regularly, but aren't totally sold on everything they hear). Then I have those friends that attend religious services for the major holidays associated with their respective religions. I have a name for them when they get all holier than thou...
Then I have an in-law who prays and reads regularly but hasn't been inside a church in many years.

I also had a very religious Catholic friend (went to church daily) who didn't understand how I could be such a good person, when I didn't practice ANY religion. I told her I failed to see why you had to be religious to be considered a good, kind person.

I think most of us can identify all of these people in our lives.
 

I added a link to Rodney Stark's CV.
 

There is no relation between religiosity and whatever measure of value we're using for "better nation." Certainly one's morality, while it may be informed or even proscripted by religion, has no direct bearing on how one acts. Consider: a priest accused of molesting a young boy. Obviously his morality forbids the action but he does it anyway.

On the national scale, when asking if our people are "better" (in what way? Better behaved? More devout?) invariably we're always asking in some manner if religion has improved the quality of life. For every story I could look up about religion being used to justify some tragic event (Heaven's Gate Cult, for instance) I could also find one about a religious charity group building a house for a poor family.

I just don't think how religious one is has any bearing on how one acts morally. Ultimately, one must make a personal choice to perform the moral action or the perform the immoral action. That can either be rationally done, or irrationally, and its rationality has no logical connection to one's metaphysical and religious beliefs.
 

Even if we are more religious--however that's defined-- it hasn't stopped us from going to war to any degree. We pray for peace every Sunday and we still go to war and people get killed, often for dubious reasons (in my view).
 

Personally, the more religious we are, the better off as a nation we will be. But religion is more than mere profession of belief. It is living and acting in accordance with those beliefs.

If all those who profess to be Christians would live Christ's teachings, no one could dispute that our nation would be better. We would be full of love, even for those who hate us and despitefully use us. We would serve others without expectation of reward. And we would forgive wayword souls and do our best to nurture them. There would be no poverty because we would all work hard and the well-off would give their means freely to succor the needy.

And frankly, I think many, if not most, of those who profess Christianity do live, as best as they can, Christ's teachings.

For every cultish attrocity, for every child-molesting priest, for every bombing done in the name of religion, there are hundreds of acts of service done quietly and without recognition. It is not on a one-to-one ratio.

By the way, those who profess a religious belief and don't live it, like a child-molesting priest, aren't really religious by my definition. They're nothing more than whited sepulchres.