Morning Drive

Saw a beat up truck today. On the driver's door and passenger's door, there were large red painted bullseyes. On the back, in splotchy white paint, it read "Hit me - I need a new truck".

Religion is bad for the country

A study just published by the Journal of Religion and Society correlates the rate of religious belief and participation with various social and societal ills among eighteen nations of the world. The author, Gregory S. Paul, a freelance scientist and scientific illustrator, describes the results of the study:

In 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.
The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.

Now, correlation ain't necessarily causation, and one could point to any number of other things that are unusual about America that might be alternative explanations for our extreme results: we're rich, we're fat, we're racially/ethnically mixed & stratified. But such explanations would have to also explain why other religious nations (e.g. Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland) also do comparatively poorly on these social yardsticks. That too could perhaps be explained away; After all, dagoes are lazy and micks are drunkards.

But we have to bend over backward just to make the religious countries come out smelling as good as the more secular countries. So I still want to send out a hearty FUCK YOU to all the people who continue to assume and proclaim that atheism leads inevitably to moral degeneracy, ill-considered movie sequels, the heartbreak of psoriasis and divine meteor strikes.