- Societies ‘worse off when they have God on their side’ ‚ÄúIn 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.”
- At the Labour party conference, Tony Blair enters to a Sham 69 song “If the kids are united, they will never be divided” – what a strange song. You can watch the entrance via the news player as well. Shame it’s not so easy to link directly through to the clip concerned.
- Apple admits to iPod Nano faults “Electronics firm Apple has admitted there have been problems with its new iPod Nano music player, after a string of complaints about damaged screens.”
- More 4 launches October 10th in the UK, and has a really bloody odd logo The advertising for this channel has been stunning. I just wish I understood why every organisation doesn’t put their ads online. It seems like such a no brainer…
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3 replies on “Links for 2005-09-29”
Like Chris Applegate, I’m very sceptical of that religion study – if you look at the data, the clusters are very loose and the US point is often an outlier. The authors say themselves “The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional … [it] is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies”, but they haven’t really drawn in the line of increasing dysfunction and increasing religiosity – let alone shown priority for religion.
I am similarly sceptical. The problem with these surveys is that they deal with highly schematised, and often very narrow, definitions of what religion and religiosity is constituted in. For example, prominent secularisation advocate and sociologist Steve Bruce persists, even in his new books, in making statistical data about churchgoing the driving resource for his thesis. To understand the nature and role of religion in Western democracies we need to look much wider, towards the appeal of astrology and similar “superstitions”, towards the language and hermeneutics of desire and appeal, towards the semiology of films such as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc., all of which contain strong religious and quasi-religious themes. I, for one, do not consider the popularity of these films to be coincidental. Looked at in this way, it becomes clear that the image of the USA as “more religious” than Europe is fragile to say the least, and may even be downright wrong.
I’m similarly skeptical about this study as Phil and Newfred and just made a post about it at my site.