Red Hot Mutha'

This is an interesting post. I've been struggling with questions of faith for the last few years, and I recently decided that I'm an athiest. It's been hard for me to decide how to handle this with Lily, but so far it hasn't really come up.

My mother read her lots of bible stories and told her all about Jesus, and so she identifies as Christian. Of course, she's never been to church and I refused to baptise her (on the grounds that is's not my JOB to choose HER FAITH).

I have always seen Christmas as social tradition and not a religious holiday, so I think that's an easy one to keep doing. When she asks about Jesus and god, and if they're real, I tell her "It depends on what you believe, Faith is just that.. believing that something exists or is true without proof". I try to explain what religious tolerance is all about, that different people believe different things, and there's no way to know who's right.

As a parent, I think there are SO MANY things that you need to teach your kids, and I don't think you need religion to help teach common sense. You don't need to believe in god and have him TELL YOU how to act, to know how to be human. Values come from the lessons of life, not the lessons of deities.

My parents are oddly religious, my mother moreso than my Dad. Neither of them knows about the Atheism, and I don't know that i'll tell them. It's just not an arguement that's worth having.

I do find a huge amount of comfort in being Athiest, for the first time in a long time I feel that I'm being honest with myself about the way I view the world, and I'm NOT AFRAID of the choice I've made. Christianity is a religion built on hypocrisy, lies, oppression and fear. Religion in general is reponsible for more chaos in this world than anything else. There's nothing more dangerous than the devout.

Stacey
 

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent


RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“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 developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.

He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.

“The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.

“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”