shermerColbert

Comedy Central has a clip from The Colbert Report in which Mr. Colbert interviews Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic. There are good moments.

Class tunes

I dropped a post over on BehaviorMod.info about some tunes I’ve been listening to recently.

nablopomo

Given that I had no post for the 1st, I guess I’m out of this. But, I can put lots of tags on this. I’ll make up for it with a brief flurry of posts here.

Secular successes

I recently remembered writing to a correspondent about the relationship between measures of social health (homicide, youth suicide, births to teens, sexually transmitted diseases, etc) and secularity. I wrote to my fellow non-believer about a source on this topic. It is an article from Journal of Religion and Society in which Gregory Paul examined “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.” He found that the relationship was not consistent with popular ideas about more religious societies having greater social health.

If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates [sic] that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution 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. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data – a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.

Link to Mr. Paul’s article. Mr. Paul’s paper has been questioned, by the way.