Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Christianity and data: Not promising

Dyer reads the sociology literature ...
Dyer: Religion and Good Behavior

... the numbers don't lie: the more religious a [Christian] country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn't do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.
Well, of course Dyer knows numbers lie all the time. Still, there does not appear to be any empirical support for the theory that religion leads to better behavior, even when that behavior is defined in Christian terms (turn the other cheek, help the poor, etc). Dyer suspects they're finding correlation rather than causation and I tend to agree, but one cannot rule out that Christianity causes bad behavior.

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