I apologize for the absence. I had an irate publisher banging on my door & had to finish something for him. OK, what’s going on?<\/p>\n
Just reading back through posts here:<\/p>\n
On the religion-and-society front, a pal in Australia sent me this<\/a>.<\/p>\n Many ordinary Australians share the belief that religious faith is an indicator of morality, and it is\u00a0 accepted wisdom that high rates of religious practice correlate with lower rates of crime, promiscuity and abortion.<\/p>\n However, a study published in the Journal of Religion and Society<\/em>, an American academic journal, set out to test this hypothesis and found there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and public health and social stability. The study, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy using data from the International Social Survey Program, Gallup and other research bodies.<\/p>\n “In general,” writes the author, Gregory Paul, “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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is stuff we’ve kicked around here on the site, but it’s interesting to see a formal study done. Interesting, too, to know that it’s being argued Down Under.<\/p>\n Apropos nothing much at all, the expression “Down Under” always brings to mind two things:\u00a0 (1) The joke traditional in English Panto<\/a> where a ribald emcee introduces some Australian act with [broad wink] “He’s very big Down Under.”\u00a0 (2) The sentence that used to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records<\/em> (but apparently no longer is), as ending with the most<\/em> possible consecutive prepositions. There’s a reference here<\/a>:<\/p>\n The incumbent record was a sentence put into the mouth of a boy who didn’t want to be read excerpts from a book about Australia as a bedtime story:\u00a0 “What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of about ‘Down Under’ up for?”<\/p>\n Mark Brader (msb@sq.com\u00a0\u2014 all this is to the best of his recollection; he didn’t save the letter, and doesn’t have access to the British editions) wrote to Guinness, asking:<\/p>\n “What did you say that the sentence with the most prepositions at the end was ‘What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of about “Down Under” up for?’ for?\u00a0 The preceding sentence has one more.”<\/p>\n Norris McWhirter replied, promising to include this improvement in the next British edition;\u00a0\u00a0 but\u00a0actually it seems that Guinness, no doubt eventually realizing that this could be done recursively, dropped the category.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I apologize for the absence. I had an irate publisher banging on my door & had to finish something for him. OK, what’s going on? Just reading back through posts here: Ben Stein:\u00a0 I’m still a bit sad about Ben. … Continue reading