← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · BlueBonnet
Thread ID: 20431 | Posts: 28 | Started: 2005-09-27
2005-09-27 20:55 | User Profile
[url="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html"]TimesOnline[/url] September 27, 2005
The Times
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.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
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 atheism and amorality.
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 ââ¬Åspiritual capitalââ¬Â. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: ââ¬ÅMany Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
ââ¬ÅIn 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.
ââ¬ÅThe United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.ââ¬Â
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the worldââ¬â¢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 ââ¬Å uniquely highââ¬Â adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: ââ¬ÅThe study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.ââ¬Â
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. ââ¬ÅI suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,ââ¬Â he added.
He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.
ââ¬ÅThe non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.
ââ¬ÅThe widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.ââ¬Â
2005-09-27 21:25 | User Profile
This article is intellectually dishonest propaganda [I]par excellence[/I]. To begin with, they are completely sidestepping the fact that most social "dysfunction" that America suffers from is due to [B]the presence of big colored minorities[/B].
(This is the same lie that they use with gun-control: Canada is generally gun-safer country than USA, but not because of its tighter regulations but rather because lower presence of colored minorities!)
Second, Steve Sailer has gathered some hard statistical evidence that Christianity has played a big part in keeping the US White working class in better shape than the English one, and he also exposes Paul's[B] lie[/B] that Britain is better off than America:
[COLOR=Blue][B]"Last week, I discussed the high crime rate in the United Kingdomââ¬âby one estimate about 40 percent worse than in the U.S."[/B][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050410_ruin.htm[/url]
[FONT=Arial][COLOR=DarkRed][B]
[I]ââ¬ÅThe widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.ââ¬Â[/I][/B][/COLOR][/FONT]
This turd is being [B]willfully blind[/B]. Countries like Netherlands are in the state of utter social and moral decay and as God will not mocked without punishment, they are being overrun by Third World hordes since they cannot reproduce themselves.
Of course, this writer would not even admit that, say, homo-marriage is a "societal disaster" of any kind. They have simply [B]legalized vice[/B] and pretended that it is therefore no longer a problem.
Petr
2005-09-27 21:38 | User Profile
[QUOTE]This turd is being willfully blind.[/QUOTE] ABSOLUTELY As are all who sing in the multi-cultural choir. Just more "Traditional America" bashing from the cultural elite. This will only change when [B]their[/B] wives and daughters are attacked and defiled by the "multi-cultural" hordes. Very few open arms to the Hmong amoung the Minn. hunting crowd these days.
2005-09-27 21:41 | User Profile
And here you can find the statistical refutation of the much-repeated canard that "atheists are under-represented in prisons". Actually, as actual jail personnel might tell you, a great majority of jailbirds are usually very irreligious, if not "officially" atheistic.
[url]http://www.adherents.com/misc/adh_prison.html[/url]
And check this out: [COLOR=Indigo][FONT=Arial] [B]"Commonly-circulated atheist "article" about atheism and incarceration is actually from [U]a 1925 document[/U] of doubtful validity written by Dale Clark."[/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.adherents.com/misc/adh_prison2.html[/url]
Petr
2005-09-27 21:48 | User Profile
This idiot commits the usual mistake of confusing correlation with cause-and-effect. During times of social hardship more people seek solace in religion. Social dysfunction causes increased rates of worship, not the other way around.
This is not to imply that believers are dysfunctional, of course. In my experience there are a solid core of worshippers in every congregation who stick with their God through rain and shine, a hard core of atheists in society who disbelieve no matter what, and a huge mass of foul-weather friends of the church who only come calling when times are tough, which explains the observations noted in this article.
2005-09-27 22:07 | User Profile
Race trumps religion. The blackies love Jesus but they still rape, rob and loot. Starkly atheist Finns are going to behave better.
This is one weird article. Check out the "journal" the writer cites...
[url]http://www.creighton.edu/JRS/[/url]
Rabbi and friend set out to "study" religion, i.e., bash it.
2005-09-27 22:34 | User Profile
I think the religiosity of American Blacks is highly overrated - it is mostly heretical [I]liberation theology [/I]where God's role is just to provide stuff for believers and make excuses for their crimes ("the White devils made them do it") instead of making people admit their [B]own [/B]sins and requiring strict behavior.
Check out this article (written by a [B]true[/B] Black Christian) to see just how religious "reverend" MLK really was:
[FONT=Arial][COLOR=Red][B][SIZE=5]Was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A Christian?[/SIZE][/B][/COLOR][/FONT]
[url]http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/king.htm[/url]
It tells volumes about the spiritual state of most American Blacks that they venerate this infidel as a saint (not even mentioning openly anti-Christian Malcolm X).
More here on the heretical "liberation theology": [FONT=Book Antiqua][B] "The focal concern or center of black theology is the white oppression of blacks. Therefore the usual theological discussions about God, Christ, and salvation are basically irrelevant. Instead these points of theology have meaning for blacks only insomuch as they relate to the question of freedom from oppression of blacks in this world."[/B][/FONT]
[url]http://www.hwhouse.com/aninvestigation.htm[/url]
Petr
2005-09-27 22:41 | User Profile
And may I add that also relatively small part of Finns are officially atheists - most of us are [I]de facto[/I] agnostics.
[FONT=Arial][B]Religions:
Lutheran National Church 84.2%, Greek Orthodox in Finland 1.1%, other Christian 1.1%, other 0.1%, none 13.5% (2003)[/B][/FONT]
[url]http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/fi.html#People[/url]
Petr
2005-09-28 02:25 | User Profile
you people are retarded. you don't deserve a more thought-out or intelligent reply than that.
2005-09-28 02:56 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Katsumi]you people are retarded. you don't deserve a more thought-out or intelligent reply than that.[/QUOTE] If that is all you have to say, STFU and GTFO. Either offer a counter worth reading, or don't post.
The article is pure BS, as religion provides many of the foundational cultural assumptions that hold a society together, just as multiculturalism acts as centripital acceleration to spin a society apart. See Russia, Rome, Turkey, Austria Hungary just to name a few Empires that collapsed due to an excess of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism. (Funnily, the first guy who ever brought that to my attention was a Jewish history professor.)
Religion and the varying ways of exercising faith provides a spark of argument and debate over how many angels dance on the head of a pin. (Likewise in the Muslim world, where the variations on a theme often cause sever conflict and bloodshed.) See the Christianity sub forum on this board to explore some of the finely argued points within the Christian viewpoint.
AE
2005-09-28 11:32 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Angeleyes] The article is pure BS, as religion provides many of the foundational cultural assumptions that hold a society together, just as multiculturalism acts as centripital acceleration to spin a society apart.[/QUOTE] This is an excellent point, AE, and it is another reason why this article's reasoning is hopelessly flawed. Britain has a 1700 year history of Christianity, which has informed its morality, its identity, its culture, its laws, and its whole civilization. To use Britain as an example of a godless society, simply because the population has become secularized over the last 50 years is downright disingenuous.
2005-09-28 14:32 | User Profile
[QUOTE]The article is pure BS, as religion provides many of the foundational cultural assumptions that hold a society together, [B]just as multiculturalism acts as centripital acceleration to spin a society apart[/B]. See Russia, Rome, Turkey, Austria Hungary just to name a few Empires that collapsed due to an excess of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism. [/QUOTE]
Which indicates to me that 'religion' is clearly secondary to overall ethnic or racial homogeneity insofar as unified, productive societies are concerned.
If America [I]were [/I] an all-white country (which it never was, but just suppose) and as stridently 'religious' as it is today, would we be Finland - or Northern Ireland of a generation ago?
[QUOTE]I think the religiosity of American Blacks is highly overrated - it is mostly heretical liberation theology where God's role is just to provide stuff for believers and make excuses for their crimes ("the White devils made them do it") instead of making people admit their own sins and requiring strict behavior.[/QUOTE]
I'm pretty amazed they've cleaved to Christianity as long as they have, actually. Worshipping the god of their ex-massas hasn't exactly paid dividends for them.
As for liberation theology, I would be shocked - shocked - if it doesn't end up completely dominating the Catholic Church within a generation or two. The health and strength of religions are inextricably tied into the Numbers Game that all earthly nations and states are subject to: sooner or later, the sheer tonnage of nonwhite Catholics are inevitably going to become the thousand-pound gorilla crowding the vestibule - particularly given the growing trend of multiracial Western societies.
2005-09-28 14:47 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Which indicates to me that 'religion' is clearly secondary to overall ethnic or racial homogeneity insofar as unified, productive societies are concerned. It indicates to me that religion is inextricably entwined with ethnic and racial solidarity, meaning that one does not occur without the other.
[QUOTE=il ragno]I'm pretty amazed they've cleaved to Christianity as long as they have, actually. Worshipping the god of their ex-massas hasn't exactly paid dividends for them. Actually, I think it has paid great dividends. They used appeals to Christian charity to end the slave trade and to achieve their current special status in society, and, notwithstanding all the pathologies of the black community, American blacks are still some of the best off in the world.
2005-09-28 14:48 | User Profile
[COLOR=Red][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "Which indicates to me that 'religion' is clearly secondary to overall ethnic or racial homogeneity insofar as unified, productive societies are concerned."[/I][/B][/FONT] [/COLOR] A shallow, [B]short-term[/B] way of looking at things. Non-religious societies cannot ultimately even muster energy to reproduce themselves, becoming tired Epicureans who are easily pushed over by any energetic outsider. [COLOR=Red][FONT=Arial][I]
[B] - "I'm pretty amazed they've cleaved to Christianity as long as they have, actually. Worshipping the god of their ex-massas hasn't exactly paid dividends for them."[/B][/I][/FONT] [/COLOR] Well well, aren't you happily repeating the Nation of Islam propaganda. Before the dawn of modern era (latter part of 20th century), Christian churches played a very considerable part in uplifting Black communities and produced people like Booker T. Washington and Thomas Sowell. Then people like (communist) W.E.B. DuBois, MLK and Malcolm X took over and it was all downhill from there.
Petr
2005-09-28 15:33 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][color=red][font=Arial]*[/font][/color][color=red][font=Arial]- "I'm pretty amazed they've cleaved to Christianity as long as they have, actually. Worshipping the god of their ex-massas hasn't exactly paid dividends for them."***[/font]
[/color]
Well well, aren't you happily repeating the Nation of Islam propaganda. Before the dawn of modern era (latter part of 20th century), Christian churches played a very considerable part in uplifting Black communities and produced people like Booker T. Washington and Thomas Sowell. Then people like (communist) W.E.B. DuBois, MLK and Malcolm X took over and it was all downhill from there.
Petr[/QUOTE]
Are folks deriding the African, and so-called "African American" Christian forgetting the Coptic Christians of Ethopia? Took hold a few centuries after Christianity started to spread, details fuzzy in my head.
(I recall reading years ago about a Methodist Episcopal Zion something (with an A) church that started in the 1800's or late 1700's as one of the initial black Christian church organizations in America. As I recall, the Quakers started it, or helped get it off the ground.
AE
2005-09-28 15:33 | User Profile
[QUOTE]I think it has paid great dividends. They used appeals to Christian charity to end the slave trade. [/QUOTE]
Not the black Christians. Those were [I]white [/I] Christians driving abolitionism. Interestingly, this is the only thread, of the thousands on this board, in which I've read white abolitionist Christians being [I]praised[/I]. Usually they're portrayed as deluded, hateful, false Christians.
[QUOTE]Non-religious societies cannot ultimately even muster energy to reproduce themselves, becoming tired Epicureans who are easily pushed over by any energetic outsider.[/QUOTE]
Then clearly some other religion is the One True Faith, because it's largely the Christian nations falling under replacement-birth levels.
[QUOTE]Christian churches played a very considerable part in uplifting Black communities and produced people like Booker T. Washington and Thomas Sowell. Then people like (communist) W.E.B. DuBois, MLK and Malcolm X took over and it was all downhill from there.[/QUOTE]
That's quite a span of time between Washington and Sowell! There's no arguing with the fact that blacks lag far behind every other racial group in the country and have done so for a century. Other nonwhite groups arrive here not even knowing the language and within five or ten years are outperforming blacks in every measurable category except on the crime and incarceration indices. I said "I'm pretty amazed they've cleaved to Christianity as long as they have. Worshipping the god of their ex-massas hasn't exactly paid dividends for them" out of the simple truth that - back when they were [I]all [/I] devout Christians - their white co-religionists would not allow them to attend their churches or schools and had assigned them legal and permanent second-class status. It was only when they began breaking with Massa's religion that they started to climb out of that box. Perhaps if they'd been encouraged to adhere to their own, different faith (or none at all) a hundred years ago, we might have minimized the terrible cost a black underclass has extracted from the US in the past century (one with no end in sight).
I view blacks as our (so-far) permanent albatross, and in all likelihood unassimilable...but why are they here in the first place? Because they were enslaved by European Christians who, upon emancipation, washed their hands of any responsibility to these 'Christians' except to isolate and contain them as inferiors. Where exactly in the New Testament does Christ exhort his followers to enact a permanent, unassailable caste system of believers?
2005-09-28 15:39 | User Profile
[COLOR=Blue][B][I] - "Then clearly some other religion is the One True Faith, because it's largely the Christian nations falling under replacement-birth levels."[/I] [/B][/COLOR] Intellectual dishonesty. You know well that we are (collectively) talking about apostate, post-Christian societies here.
(American Amish communities have sub-Saharan-level birthrates, btw.)
Petr
2005-09-28 15:40 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][color=blue] - "Then clearly some other religion is the One True Faith, because it's largely the Christian nations falling under replacement-birth levels." [/color] Intellectual dishonesty. You know well that we are (collectively) talking about apostate, post-Christian societies here.
(American Amish communities have sub-Saharan-level birthrates, btw.) Petr[/QUOTE] So do Mormons.
AE
2005-09-28 16:21 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Not the black Christians. Those were white * Christians driving abolitionism. Interestingly, this is the only thread, of the thousands on this board, in which I've read white abolitionist Christians being praised*. Usually they're portrayed as deluded, hateful, false Christians. I'm aware that white Christians were the main proponents of abolitionism, but I did not claim otherwise. I also am not praising white abolitionist Christians; I'm not even sure how you got that out of what I wrote. I merely stated that they used appeals to Christian charity, which they did. Was that Christian charity misguided? Probably.
[QUOTE=il ragno] Then clearly some other religion is the One True Faith, because it's largely the Christian nations falling under replacement-birth levels. Europe does have below replacement-level birthrates, but it would be hard to argue that Europe is still Christian in a meaningful sense. I would argue, in fact, that it is the loss of Christianity, not the presence of it, that has led to the decline in birthrates.
2005-09-28 16:45 | User Profile
In fact, systematic abolitionism was started by[B] Quakers[/B], whom I do not consider to be Christians any more than I do Jehovah's Witnesses, and it was largely [B]Unitarians [/B]who picked up their torch in the 19th century.
[B]Neo-Pelagians[/B] like Charles Finney were also among main players.
From David Chilton's book [I]Productive Christians In An Age Of Guilt Manipulators - A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider[/I] (1986), available online in here, pages 85-88:
[url]http://www.freebooks.com/docs/html/dcpc/dcpc.html[/url][SIZE=3] [FONT=Times New Roman]
"Committed as he is to liberation from slavery, Ronald Sider is not ignorant of past attempts. One movement particularly revered by him is the Abolitionist activity of the nineteenth century. [B]He especially applauds the radicalism of the preacher Charles Finney, who founded Oberlin College as a haven for abolitionism and feminism.[/B] Jonathan Blanchard, an early student at Oberlin, went on to become Wheaton Collegeââ¬â¢s first president, and Sider mourns that Wheaton eventually declined from its original position as a hotbed of social activism. However, it is Siderââ¬â¢s statements on Finney and Abolitionism which are of special interest. Writing in the Christian Century, he claims that ââ¬ÅCharles Finneyââ¬â¢s evangelical abolitionists stood solidly in the biblical tradition in their search for justice for the poor and oppressed of their time.ââ¬Â4 Expanding on this theme, he writes elsewhere:
[I]Finney was the Billy Graham of the nineteenth century. He led evangelistic crusades throughout the country. The filling of the Holy Spirit was central in his life and preaching. He was also one of the leading abolitionists working to end the unjust system of slavery. Church discipline was used at his church at Oberlin College which he founded against anyone holding slaves. Finney and his students practiced civil disobedience to protest unjust laws. Over Christmas holidays, Finneyââ¬â¢s students went out by the scores to hold evangelistic meetings. And they preached against the sin of participating in slavery as well as personal sins. [B]Recent study has shown that the abolitionist movement in many states of the mid-West U.S. grew directly out of these revival campaigns by Finney and his students.[/B] I dream of that kind of movement in the church today. . . . [/I]
[B]The abolitionist movement was, it is true, a religious movement. But its religion was antichristian humanism.[/B] Otto Scott, in his masterful study of the conspirators who financed John Brownââ¬â¢s murderous exploits, shows the development of the abolitionist campaign ââ¬â a description which may contain a prophecy of Siderââ¬â¢s evangelical liberationist as well: [I] ââ¬ÅThe new religion had started with arguments against such relatively harmless sins as smoking and drinking, had then grown to crusades denouncing and forbidding even commerce with persons whose morals were held to be invidious; it had expanded into antislavery as the answer to every ill of humanity; and it had finally come to full flower in the belief that killing anyone ââ¬â innocent or guilty ââ¬â was an act of righteousness for a new morality.[/I]ââ¬Â6
[B]American abolitionism took a very different route from that of the British, who were able to eliminate colonial slavery in a lawful, peaceful manner, without the shedding of blood. [/B]The British process was gradual, and over a period of years the slaves were apprenticed and enabled to earn their own keep, while slaveholders were compensated for their financial loss. But the abolitionists in the United States refused to acknowledge any law but their own. Although they knew that most Southerners were not slaveholders, they agitated for chaos and revolution. [B]As John Brown put it: ââ¬Å[U]If any obstacle stands in your way, you may properly break all the Decalogue in order to get rid of it.[/U]ââ¬Â[/B]
...
[B]"The atmosphere in which abolitionism thrived was produced by such men as the creedless Unitarian crusader, William Ellery Charming, who called for ââ¬Åguerrilla war . . . at every chance.ââ¬Â [U]Charming was a major influence on young Ralph Waldo Emerson, the chief exponent of New England pantheism and transcendentalism - and a considerable warmonger as well[/U].[/B] To many, his pacifistic nature-worship seems harmless: the very mention of Emerson conjures up serene visions of gurgling brooks, sparkling dew on new-folden leaves, and Henry David Thoreau behind bars. The sophoric calm is shattered as we read such lines as these, uttered by the venerable Sage of Concord:
[I]ââ¬ÅIf it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.[/I]ââ¬Â11
The benign mask dropped altogether when Emerson and Thoreau compared the terrorist John Brown, murderer of innocents, to Jesus Christ. The gallows on which he was hanged became ââ¬Åas glorious as the Cross.ââ¬Â [B]And Charles Grandison Finney, ââ¬Åthe Billy Graham of the nineteenth century,ââ¬Â was at the heart of the movement. [U]Theologically, he was a Pelagian, a heretic[/U]. Bennet Tyler observed, in 1854, that [I] ââ¬Åno orthodox body of Christians could receive him into their pulpit. [/B]No doubt he published works that contained rousing and startling truths; but even truth was given forth alongside of much error which counteracted all. And now he seems to be drifting no one can tell whither. . . . He adjusts whatever he finds in the Bible to his own preconceived metaphysical determinations, instead of submitting his metaphysical musings to the test of unerring wisdom.ââ¬Â[/I][/FONT][/SIZE]
For more on C.G. Finney's doctrines, see here: [COLOR=Purple] [FONT=Arial][SIZE=5]A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing[/SIZE]
[SIZE=4]How Charles Finney's Theology Ravaged the Evangelical Movement[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/articles/finney.htm[/url]
Petr
2005-09-28 16:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][size=3][font=Times New Roman]The British process was gradual, and over a period of years the slaves were apprenticed and enabled to earn their own keep, [u]while slaveholders were compensated for their financial loss. But the abolitionists in the United States refused to acknowledge any law but their own.[/u] Although they knew that most Southerners were not slaveholders, they agitated for chaos and revolution. As John Brown put it: ââ¬Å[u]If any obstacle stands in your way, you may properly break all the Decalogue in order to get rid of it.[/u]ââ¬Â[/font][/size] [/QUOTE]And that is, to my mind, the root cause of the War Between the States. (Or whatever one wants to call it, the War of Southern Secession, The War of Yankee Aggression, et al)
There was no quid pro quo. There was no, to my mind, negotiation in good faith. "You guys cease and desist in the practice of humanslavery, and here is the carrot to induce you to follow that course. Here's a deal where we can both walk away from the table with a little something."
All that was used was the stick. One cannot negotiate with A True Believer.
Gee, the world (in terms of how people try to get things done) hasn't changed much, has it? :blink:
AE
2005-09-28 17:11 | User Profile
I also understand that cynical Machiavellian federalists, led by Lincoln, took abolitionism as their hobby-horse - as a way of making the southern states submit to the central power - just like "spreading democracy" is not the real reason but mere window-dressing for the neocon aggression.
I have read Tom DiLorenzo's book [I]The Real Lincoln[/I], and I think he pretty much establishes the fact that Lincoln was an ambitious hypocrite who did not care much about Blacks but did care very much about the federal Leviathan-state and about squelching the dissent against it. He was therefore not interested in peaceful solutions that would leave the South with its power intact.
Petr
2005-09-28 19:28 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]I also understand that cynical Machiavellian federalists, led by Lincoln, took abolitionism as their hobby-horse - as a way of making the southern states submit to the central power - just like "spreading democracy" is not the real reason but mere window-dressing for the neocon aggression.
I have read Tom DiLorenzo's book The Real Lincoln, and I think he pretty much establishes the fact that Lincoln was an ambitious hypocrite who did not care much about Blacks but did care very much about the federal Leviathan-state and about squelching the dissent against it. He was therefore not interested in peaceful solutions that would leave the South with its power intact. Petr[/QUOTE] Slavery was compromised over during the drafting of the Constitution. It was an issue that was never going to go away, politically.
AE
2005-09-28 19:46 | User Profile
And here is statistical evidence from Steve Sailer indicating that conservative Christian lifestyle does good for Blacks as well, although not quite as much as to Whites:
[url]http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/09/religion-urban-life-and-morals.html[/url] [FONT=Arial] [B] Tuesday, September 06, 2005 [SIZE=4] Religion, Urban Life, and Morals:[/SIZE][/B]
A reader writes:
[I]One thing that seems to be missing from the conversation is religion... There is something to be said for the notion that God tests people with disaster, or, rather, a belief in God makes them better able to weather disaster.
We have a good comparison for this with New Orleans and Mississippi. I have yet to hear of looting in Mississippi that reached the scale it did in New Orleans. Yet Mississippi didn't lack for temptations. Anyone watching Fox or MSNBC saw those casino barges carried half a mile inland and busted open for all the world to see. Nor does Mississippi lack for Wal-Marts and other department stores. And while the population in Mississippi might not be as black as New Orleans' population, it certainly has a large presence. The only difference between the two areas is that one is governed by an ethic that is driven by the most shameless hedonism, while the swears by the kind of Bible-beating fundamentalism sneered at by our nation's elite. [/I] Another reader writes:[I]
Also, a point on the stupidity and destructiveness of noticing racial differences, I was listening to NPR and some Mississippi congressman was furious that he was not allowed to distribute relief supplies by FEMA because they insisted that it all had to be surrounded by National Guard escorts to prevent riots over the food. He was saying "my people are not from New Orleans, they all know each other and they would behave civilly." FEMA would not even let them take it with police escorts, so eventually they had to waste millions of dollars by using National Guard Helicopters (this is somehow outside of FEMA's jurisdiction) to get the food to the affected areas, even though the roads were clear, and of course there was no rioting or problems over the supplies. I've been trying to find an article about the story online, but I haven't been able to. I'll send you a link if I find it.[/I]
Another important point that a number of my readers have made to me is to note there are probably differences in law-abidingness between big city and small town people. The anonymity of urban life is more conducive to life as a criminal since bystanders are less likely to recognize you as you commit a crime. Whereas, in small towns, witnesses are likely to tell the sheriff, "Oh, it was that Jones boy again, the bad one, not the nice one who plays the flute, but that no-good one you arrested last year."
[B]That, along with the moral-cultural differences, may help explain why the black imprisonment rate in 1997 in absolute terms, according to a liberal activist group, was almost 50% higher in Louisiana than Mississippi.
Nationally, the black imprisonment rate per capita was 9.1 times the non-Hispanic white rate back in 1997, but it tended to be significantly lower in conservative southern states, such as only 6.0 times the white rate in Mississippi, and 6.1 times higher in Alabama. In Louisiana, it's 7.5 times higher. This suggests to me that rural living and and church-going are, on average, good for black people.[/B]
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2005-09-29 02:29 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Quantrill] Europe does have below replacement-level birthrates, but it would be hard to argue that Europe is still Christian in a meaningful sense. I would argue, in fact, that it is the loss of Christianity, not the presence of it, that has led to the decline in birthrates.[/QUOTE] This article was written for a Brittish readership. I guess there is a big push to force pc to it's limits. Being that GB is Christian, and the Islamic and Hindu populations are rising, I'm sure the British nationalists are making a bit of a ruckus. I suspect the writer and publisher of this article is trying desperately to subjogate the white, Christian foundation that IS Great Britain.
2005-09-29 20:31 | User Profile
Once again, good ol' Stevie brings a whole lot of clear sense into the discussion.
He is probably right on that Europeans are presently spending down their moral inheritance - many WNs don't see anything controversial in the idea that the Talmudic religion is still very considerably influencing the behavior of secular Jews, but choke on the idea that the basic social decency that Euros still display could be similar sort of slag-over from Christianity...
[url]http://www.isteve.com/[/url][FONT=Times New Roman][COLOR=Indigo] [FONT=Times New Roman] [SIZE=4] [B]More bad analysis[/B]:[/SIZE] [SIZE=3]Drudge links to a Time of London article that claims:
[I]'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... ââ¬ÅIn 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.
ââ¬ÅThe United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.ââ¬Â[/I]
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;"
[B][I]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[/I]. [/B]
The U.S. has roughly 200,000,000 guns, so murder rates are always higher here, but in recent decades, the UK has been proving Heinlein's Corollary that a disarmed society is a drunken, brawling, home-invading society.
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 the other measures the article cites are worse among blacks and Hispanics as well.
[B]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, as measured by drunkenness, 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. [/B]
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[SIZE=4] [B]That Religion and Bad Behavior article:[/B][/SIZE] [SIZE=3]A reader writes: [I] I think the meme in this "Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side" article in the London Times that Drudge pushed yesterday - that religion is bad for society - is starting to "tip" which means that a well put together response by you might also have a chance to circulate.[/I]
I doubt it! Lies go halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. [I] Newsgator highlighted this as the "top internet story of the day" today, with 127 blog links. I think it is pretty telling of journalistic biases that they would run with an article like this, and not with one about IQ.[/I]
The original article, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies, appeared in the Journal of Religion & Society put out by the Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton University. It's by Gregory S. Paul of Baltimore, MD, who doesn't list any academic qualifications (not that there's anything wrong with that!). [B] Paul's basic gimmick is an old chestnut, one I've seen dozens of times before: to make America look bad by comparing crime and other statistics for the entire American population, which is 27% black or Hispanic, to Europeans countries that are at least 90% white. That way, you can prove that secularism or socialism or soccer or whatever you like about Europe is better for people than whatever you don't like about America. [/B]
This sleight of hand can be highly effective in duping readers into making apples to oranges comparisons between the U.S. and European countries. Why? Because we aren't allowed -- in polite society -- to write about how much higher the crime rates, abortion rates, STD rates and the like are for blacks and Hispanics than they are for whites or Asians.
But let's just put that key point about the racial make-up of the populations aside for the moment and look at some recent crime statistics for the overall American population, all races, versus various European populations. And America still comes out looking pretty good. Europe (not just Britain) has been undergoing a moral decline, at least as reflected in crime statistics, whereas the U.S. seems to have been on the moral upswing since a recent low point in the early 1990s.
Another reader scoffs at my initial objection to this article: [I] So the religious whites of the USA are less criminal than in Britain. So what, you have one data point. Whites in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Finland, Germany, and Nordic countries are all both less religious and less violent than US whites...
Your theory fails.[/I]
Not so fast. That may (or may not) have once been true, but it's not true these days.
Here is the 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey report of the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute. Figure 5 shows what % of respondents in 17 advanced countries said they were victims of "selected contact crimes" (robbery, sexual assault, or assault with force) in 1999.
The 17-country average was 2.4%. For the U.S., though only 1.9 % of the overall population had been victimized, putting the U.S. 13th out of 17 affluent countries in violent crime victimization prevalence. The most violent country in 1999 on this measure was Australia, at 4.1%, followed by England & Wales, Canada, Scotland, Poland, Finland, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, and then, finally, the USA (1.9%).
And, for American whites, that violent victimization prevalence figure would be significantly lower, perhaps down around, say, 1.2% -- because whites get victimized a lot less than blacks and Hispanics. (For example, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics states, "Blacks were 6 times more likely than whites to be murdered in 2002." That's a consequence of the fact, according to BJS, that, "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002." For homicide, the white victimization rate, which includes a lot of Hispanics, was 59% of the overall American homicide rate, so, 1.2% looks like a good guess.)
This suggests that for American whites, the chance of being violently victimized in a year would probably be below even Belgium, Catalan Spain, and Portugal. Japan, though, would still be off in its own nonviolent universe at only 0.4%.
Of course, what matters for the question of whether the greater religiousness of American whites makes them behave worse than European whites is not the chance of being violently victimized, but the chance of them violently victimizing someone else. Since a moderate fraction of the victimizations of American whites are committed by nonwhites, further research might show that as of the last few years, Americans might be the least violent whites on Earth.
There are other ways to measure crime rates, and I'd encourage you to look at the other graphs in this chapter of the UN report. The summary graph for prevalence of being a victim of any kind of crime, including property crimes, shows Americans (of all races) coming in only 11th worst out of 17. On the other hand, if you measure total reported incidents of victimizations, Americans come in about fifth or sixth overall, reflecting the high rate of recurrent victimizations of minorities (by other minorities, it ought to be needless to say, but it's not).
The brand new version of this UN crime victimization survey will be out shortly. The Times of London had a preview, which showed roughly the same results as in 1999.
Of course, probably the biggest reason for America's low crime rates these days is because we lock up vast numbers of bad guys while the Europeans let them out too quickly. The big crime surge started in America in the 1960s when we cut prison sentences. Here's a graph showing how in America the murder rate (red) turned up about 1965 while the imprisonment rate (blue) dropped. We finally got tough in the 1980s and a decade or so later we saw a payoff.
The European crime surge started later than the American one, so they are still in the liberal wimp phase of response. (Also, having more guns, our worst criminals kill each other off at rates high enough, especially during the cracks years, to put a dent, I suspect, in the total crime rate.) [U][B]Still, it's not implausible to guess that the Europeans are spending down their enormous inheritance of Christian morality and aren't making any new deposits. You can coast for a long time on the civilization your ancestors built, but not forever.[/B][/U]
As for abortion rates, the pro-choice Alan Guttmacher think tank reports that in America the number of abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic white women fell from 19 in 1991 to 11 by 1999. The African-American abortion rate was about 54 in 1999 (or close to five times higher) and the Hispanic rate about 30, making the overall national rate almost twice the white rate.
The most recent Alan Guttmacher Institute report says that non-Hispanic whites have only 40.9% of all abortions in the U.S.
The abortion rate in America (all races) is currently 20.9, compared to a global average of about 38 in "developed countries." The white American abortion rate of approximately 11 compares favorably to five of the seven advanced, mostly white countries broken out in the most AGI report: Australia 22.2, Sweden 18.7, Denmark 16.5, Canada 16.4, England & Wales 15.6. The U.S. white abortion rate, however, is worse than in Germany 7.6 and Holland 6.5.
So, the crime and abortion evidence suggests that religion has a good effect on the behavior of America's whites, although probably not as good an effect as long prison terms.
A Scandinavian reader comments:
[I]I grew up in one of those low-crime, low-everything, nice Scandinavian countries. I spent my high-school years in an area with a substantial evangelical population and I can assure you that the evangelicals were quite simply better behaved than us secularists in just about every category imaginable. Was it their faith that guided them to less anti-social behavior?
Duh![/I]
A reader who went to public school in the South writes:
[I]In high school, we had a German exchange student who prided herself on being a Marxist who had participated in street fights against neo-Nazis. She was extremely pretty though her hair was ultra short and she dressed like a biker. Somehow, we were friends. She went on and on all the time about the superiority of her country, socialism, the high level of educational achievement in Europe, etc....
Now she and I were taking environmental science together as I wasn't ready for physics, but had taken chemistry early and just wanted something ultra-easy; they just stuck her in there. And with us were, well, you can figure it out. The backdrop for our political discussions was kids running around, jumping on desks, shouting, pretending to hump anything from chairs to unsuspecting girls from the back, etc. The chaos occurred on a daily basis.
One day, after months of touting the greatness of Europe and socialism, she looked about the room and with melancholy in her voice and sadness in her eyes, she said, "I now know why America is the way it is."[/I]
Of course, that's also why some of the things about America that make America more fun than Europe are the way they are, too. Life is full of tradeoffs.
What about the religion-crime connection within the U.S.? A social scientists writes:
[I]Another way to approach the religion-crime issue is to compare U.S. regions. Using data from the General Social Survey on the nine divisions of the country, I calculated the correlation between the percent of whites who never attend church with the share who have ever been arrested: It was r = .77. For example, the Pacific division, dominated by California, has the highest arrest rate and the highest percent of people who never attend religious services--25.4%.[/I]
Interesting. I hadn't expected it to be that high.
In summary, the popularity of this article is just another example of how the aversion to writing about racial differences in crime rates in America makes us stupider and more prone to fall for falsehoods. Our body politic possesses an immune system against lies, but we weaken it when we refuse to think about large areas of truth. See, every truth is tied to every other truth, making a great web of truths in which to catch lies. but when we snip out a major section of the web because it's politically incorrect, more lies can fly right through.
This disingenuous essay about religion's effect on behavior comes along and lots of supposedly intelligent bloggers fall for it because they are clueless about racial differences in behavior.
And yet ... they aren't clueless at all when it comes to their own safety -- they don't buy a home for their family in a black underclass neighborhood, precisely because they know perfectly well how much more dangerous it is. They've just compartmentalized this knowledge into Facts I Live By and make sure it never contaminates the part of their brains where they fondle the Fantasies I Tell Other People to Live By.[[/COLOR]/SIZE][/FONT]
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Petr
2005-10-01 22:19 | User Profile
Hugh Lincoln,
You are very Right!
[QUOTE=Hugh Lincoln]Race trumps religion. The blackies love Jesus but they still rape, rob and loot. Starkly atheist Finns are going to behave better. [/QUOTE]
2005-10-01 23:09 | User Profile
Like I just argued, Hugh Lincoln is not "very right" about this, only "approximately right."
Petr