--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > Check out this quote: > > "While you believe that bringing an end to religion is an > impossible goal, it is important to realize that much of the > developed world has nearly accomplished it. Norway, Iceland, > Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the > Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the > least religious societies on earth.
But did this happen because somebody or some group that opposes religion, like Harris, actively "brought it about"? Did these developed nations "accomplish" the decline of religion in their societies? Harris seems to be suggesting some kind of deliberate instrumentation of this decline that could be repeated in the United States. What does he think it was? According > to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they > are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, > adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, > gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar > as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely > the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of > France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of > Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, > the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United > Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious. And here Harris appears to suggest that correlation implies causation, a very distinctly unscientific principle. More likely, I should think, is that there is an underlying cause or set of causes for both the decline in religion and the improvement in social indicators. I suspect what is behind the U.S. statistics on both religious belief and social indicators is a pervasive strain of authoritarian psychology in this society, as expounded, for example, by John Dean in his recent book "Conservatives Without Conscience." Harris goes on to refer to the "comparatively secular states of the Northeast" in the U.S. But the "secularism" he refers to is in large part not a matter of an absence of religious belief, but rather the positions that religion should be a private matter, that there should be a strict separation of church and state, that you can't legislate morality, and so on. These positions are functions of a liberal, nonauthoritarian psychology, which affects both the type of religious belief one holds and one's political/social stances. The latter are not somehow caused by a lack of the former; the reverse is the case. A significant percentage of northeastern "secularists" are in fact religious. If they were in a position to shape and implement public policy (as they're just beginning to be now, with the election of a Democratic Congress), we might well see a change for the better in our social indicators to bring them closer to what we see in Europe. But we wouldn't necessarily see a decline in religious belief per se, simply a lessening of the power to affect social indicators of the kind of religious belief that stems from an authoritarian psychology.
