{"id":228,"date":"2008-11-28T14:03:45","date_gmt":"2008-11-28T22:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=228"},"modified":"2008-12-05T17:40:46","modified_gmt":"2008-12-06T01:40:46","slug":"on-religion-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/on-religion-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"On religion & morality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heather’s post, Religion and Moral Behavior<\/a>, allows me to make a point which I think is important. \u00a0Some conservatives who argue for the powerful utility of religion in promoting the social order ignore the confounds with other parameters, and look at research which might suggest the efficacy of religion ceteris paribus.<\/em> So, they make an inference that X increment of religiosity ? Y increment of social amity and Z decrement of social anomie. Extrapolating to the aggregate one then projects the increased social amity which might be generated by increased religiosity. The problem which this sort of model though is the point about the interaction of religion with other social variables; e.g., race, education and income. The groups where religion is concentrated in America today are those who are reservoirs of a great deal of social pathology already, while the groups where religion is weakest are those with lower levels of social pathology. Within the group where social pathology is low (e.g., Jews), the religious may be less prone to various problems, so you might obtain some increment of positive good, but you would receive far less than you might expect projecting out of from microeconomic research. As an illustration, consider Japan, along with Sweden probably the most secular advanced nation in the world. The Japanese might get some value out of greater religiosity, but their murder rate is so low that the return would be small. Contrast that with Nigeria, where some have joked that the nation’s only two exports are oil and preachers. Since religion already saturates the society, increasing religious belief would be hard to do.<\/p>\n

Below the fold is a chart which displays confidence in the existence of god for blacks and whites of lower and higher educational attainments. I think looking at these data will make clear my point about the issue of marginal returns.<\/p>\n

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Heather’s post, Religion and Moral Behavior, allows me to make a point which I think is important. \u00a0Some conservatives who argue for the powerful utility of religion in promoting the social order ignore the confounds with other parameters, and look … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[54,57],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":547,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}