Gregory Paul was written a paper (published by The Journal of Religion and Society) entitled Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies. Inside he concludes "can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today." In Paul's own words

"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 developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly."

If I were this guy I'd lay low for, well, a long time. These people may be warped and backward, but they also have a lot of free time and tend to act violently. To clear things up Paul states

"In Western society, there are many, many secularized nations that are performing quite well socially. So that'’s the main conclusion ... What I'’ve done is I've falsified what I call the creationist social hypothesis, and I'’ve done that forever. You can never make the claim again that it's impossible to have a society that'’s non-religious that does well.

Not satisified, the Right denonnced the paper as "communist" and written by a "1960'’s leftover freakoid." They maintain that it isn't intellectually sound. However, experts have concluded that the paper is fair but state that the Right has a point which no one can come up with.

Strictly speaking -— and that is the only way academics speak - Paul'’s study marshals reasonable data that credibly demonstrates, under its terms, that the United States is the most faithful of the 18 Western democracies it studies. It furthermore demonstrates that it scores at or near the bottom of a variety of indicators of social dysfunction, including homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, teen pregnancy and abortion.

Posted by Geoff