I saw this statement today. What do you think?

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depends on how you define what good people are and what good or bad things are.

I must agree with de mighty shadow, "good" and "bad" are subjective terms. If that statement said that religion causes war, I would have to agree. More people have died in the name of God than any other war in our history.

hmmm..... I don't know. Initially, my response was "yes" because religion often asks us to mistrust our own thoughts/experiences in favor of some external authority. To make matters worse, what we're told about God is usually based on past interpretations of certain texts, told to us by other human beings who got their knowledge in the same way. Because we want to please both God and the other authorities in our life, we may be willing to do anything, including ignore an innate sense of what is good/bad (i.e. small children trained to be suicide bombers).

On the other hand, if there is a God (which assumes perfect order in the universe), then there are no coincidences. If this is the case, then it's all part of our learning, both as individuals and as an evolving human race. Seen another way, it's part of the dream (illusion) of seperation, from which we need to awaken.

Up to this point in history, I'm not sure many religions have that much to do with God - it seems they have more to do with the men who created them.

Several years ago, in a Journal of Religion and Society article called "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look," Gregory Paul tried to examine whether religion made people behave better. You might think that if it were true, highly religious nations like the U.S. should have better social results than more secular ones, like Britain. Paul's survey covered data from 18 developed countries, but what he found was not quite what you would expect, if religion caused better behaviour.

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, (venereal disease), teen pregnancy, and abortion," his report said. On the other hand, it also showed that "none of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."

In the U.S., Paul reported, "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, sexually transmitted disease, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast, where societal conditions, secularization and acceptance of evolution approach European norms." The U.S is the most religious of the 18 countries that Paul surveyed, but also has the highest rates for teen pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis.

There's no agreement on what causes this, but there are some who feel strongly that religion and spending on social programs are negatively correlated. More religious nations spend less on social programs because they assume, perhaps, that "God will provide."

I think also we must remember that secular societies do not spend a lot of time worrying about the moral choices of its members, outside of what is legal. Therefore, they are more likely to accept pre-marital sex, homosexuality, alternate lifestyles, where more religious societies are very, very likely to come down hard on those things, up to and including killing daughters (never sons) for sex outside of marriage, killing or jailing homosexuals for nothing worse than having loving relationships with their own gender, etc. It's the religious attitudes of people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson (Focus on the Family) whose attitudes are assumed by their religious followers, and those attitudes are most assuredly filled with fear and loathing of people who aren't just like them.

And that results, by one pathway or another, in events like the killing of Matthew Sheppard and the shunning of 3 young brothers carrying the AIDS virus, who had to be returned to their school under court order and police guard in 1987, despite a boycott by frightened parents that kept up to half the pupils at home. These boys, Richard (10) Robert (9) and Randy (8) Ray were all hemophiliacs but had no symptoms of AIDS-related diseases. But they were shunned and feared and hated by their friends and neighbours in DeSoto county, a nice religious enclave in Florida.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Well I certainly think that there are religious communities that have been exploited by people with prejudices and that have few scrupples... I think it also depends on the type of religious comunity and how it's organized...if it is more prone to being exploited. So there are a wide variety of commmunities and some are more vulnerable than others to being influenced and some are more adaptable to change also.

But it would be very difficult I think to draw any general conclusions.

- Art

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"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

" More religious nations spend less on social programs because they assume, perhaps, that "God will provide."

It seems that to spend less on social programs because of God does not make sense. In poorer countries etc they must depend on each other and they believe in God but they do not believe God will provide free room service .
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" "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, (venereal disease), teen pregnancy, and abortion," his report said. "

With the majority of the people believing in God it would make sense . I assume the ratio of non-believers to believers would show no difference .

One can also say religion makes bad people do good things.

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Recently I have been curiously fascinated to read about the Mountain Meadow Massacre that took place In Utah in 1857.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre

This atrocity is reported to have been perpetrated by a band of Mormans and Indians against a wagon train of innocent emigrants crossing the Southern territory into California. One of the Mormons that led the brutal attacks was John D. Lee.

When they interviewed a well known aquaintant of Mr. Lee for character reference this man said that John Lee was a caring man who would give another man the shirt off his back or the food off his plate but if Bringham Young had wanted John Lee to kill this same man, John Lee would not hesitate to kill him on the spot. So I guess faith can bring out the worse in someone.

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"There is one thing that organized religion is not qualified to teach and that is an individual's purpose."-GOD

Interesting story. But what is happening here, I think, is what I've been trying to talk about for ages -- this whole notion of limited revelation. Here's a man who would do what Brigham Young asked him to do, presumably because the man thought that Young was getting direction directly from God. The followers of Christianity believe that Christ, Paul and the other Apostles got their messages directly (or through inspiration) from God, and therefore these messages must be adhered to. Muslims believe that God spoke to Mohammad, while the Jews are pretty certain God spoke to Moses.

But at the same time, there were those who believed the same thing about Jim Jones, David Koresh, Sun Myung Moon, and others.

The bottom line is this. Perhaps Voltaire was quite correct in these few quotations following:

• As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
• Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
• All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

If I were to think (as I do) that religion can (not necessarily does) cause people to do bad things, these would be high on my list of reasons why.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.