…or, what if the things you believe are fundamental to keeping your society together are in some way linked to the negative effects that you see around you?
That might be the sort of question you ask after reading a study published in the Journal of Religion & Society which suggests that a high level of religious belief may harm a society.
As reported in the Times, the study, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies looks at data across the first world Western democracies, and examines both the level of overt belief in God / disbelief in evolution and the occurrence of various societal measures such as homicides, early mortality, STDs, teenage pregancy and abortion. The paper finds strong correlations between the general level of religiosity in a society and high levels of these negative measures.
The author is clear that this is an initial study of the correlation between data sets, and does not hypothesise a causal link, however he does include a call to arms for social sicences to examine these issues more closely.
Ironically, the scientific method, which to-date has been shown to be the most effective way of exploring links between events “out there” and putative causes is, I suspect, likely to be the last thing that members of a highly religious society will turn to.
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October 14th, 2005 at 11:19 am
What if ….
“…. what if the things you believe are fundamental to keeping your society together are in some way linked to the negative effects that you see around you?” Synesthesia
October 17th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
Euan/Julian. A quick thought, prompted by Jonathan Sacks on Radio 4’s today programme this morning.
‘The tabernacle of sustainability’
IMVHO, we face a near vertical learning curve in improving the quality of decision-making over long timescales, bearing in mind the paucity of human knowledge and the clumsiness of our dialogues.
Building on the synaesthesia post, it is clear to me that religion - which de facto does not learn - is a bad model for adapting to complexity.
But equally science, which depends upon falsifiability to make progress, is incapable of grand leaps of judgement.
It offers no answers to uncertainty.
All judgements are loaded. But all dogma is bad. QED ad nauseam.
What we must strive for, and shall never achieve, is complete transparency - of value, of implication, of intent and of motivation.
Only by explicitly sharing all these layers currently implicit in our individual decisions, can we hope to make genuine ‘collectively consciously competent’ progress.
Which eventually brings me to my point:
Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks remains, to my mind of today’s great thinkers, and certainly a great rhetorician, fuses science and religion in his thinking.
On Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ today, he drew a contrast between country house thinking, and hotel thinking around treatment of diverse communities.
Instead he advocates a ‘tabernacle’ approach. Together, as a society we must build something in which we can all share, and to which we can all contribute - a mutual enterprise.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thought/
It is not enough, I would argue, never consciously to do harm. We must strive not to imply harm. And we must not consciously intend harm. Nor must we be motivated to perpetrate harm.
Any code of conduct which rewards these feelings and conversations is ultimately unsustainable.
The tabernacle of sustainability is our ongoing struggle to build a better rulebook. To overcome our individual limitations, and find a collective higher consciousness.