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more people will grow up in religious households than not; but that I see as a good thing, as it will decrease the overall fear of religion from people who don't have much direct experience with it

HAH! Funny. Let me ask you this -- think about the last time you've seen someone who's terrified of at least one religion. Was that person afraid because they were atheist and had had no exposure to religion, or because they were in fact religious and were threatened by the differences between their own religion and the other[s]?

Oh, also, this. Your hypothesis is flawed in pretty much every possible way.

I'm not well versed in Malaysian law, but I found Malaysia to be pretty forgiving to non-Malaysians in regards to Sharia law. IIRC they judge their muslim citizens by Sharia law, but expats are allowed more freedoms. I personally loved Malaysia and felt no oppression when I was there, and was amazed to find that it was so Islamic when my plane landed.

Malaysia is over 60% muslim, which is coincidental because 60% of the world's muslim population lives in Asia, whereas only 20% is in the middle east. http://pewforum.org/Muslim/Mapping-the-Global-Muslim-Population.aspx

Atheist fundamentalists -- all three of them? 1.6% of US citizens describe themselves as atheist ( http://religions.pewforum.org/reports ). Most atheists are "live and let live" type people having been at the wrong end of religious discrimination for just about ever. Newer atheists tend to be noisier, but that fades.

Anyway, let's be generous and say 10% of atheists are "fundamentalists" (probably more like 1% or less). That means with a 300m population, the US, there would be 480,000 militant atheists. Compared to the 78,000,000 evangelicals, I think the bible bangers have nothing to fear from those damned atheists.

Christians with a persecution complex: that's like Bill Gates feeling poor.

But they are still dependent on Evangelicals for their vote.

Perhaps, but this is changing. PewForums (where you got your data) shows a 5% shift towards the democratic side between the Kerry and Obama elections. Regardless, PF doesn't show statistics on the "Christian Right". These are the real people that you should be targeting (as I've said before). They are basically the Christians who believe they have the right to wield their numbers to create a more Christian state, a position I and many other Christians disagree with.

McCain flipped on ... this is called an abdication of principles, or a sign that you didn't have any in the first place.

And I don't disagree, but again, you have failed to show how this is different than 95% of the other politicians out there.

do you believe a woman's body belongs to the government?

Once again, you are completely mischaracterizing the argument. I suspect you are doing so purposefully to get a rise out of people. I know a lot of pro-lifers, and none of them believe this.

when do you think a fetus has the rights of a human being?

This is the real question.

If you say the second after an egg is fertilized, I call bullshit

Call it all you want, but drawing a line is exceedingly difficult. I'm not trying to espouse one view over another here, but suffice it to say that the argument doesn't deserve the one-dimensional framing that you give it.

If the Republican party really cared about preventing abortion, they'd make condoms and day after pills free.

Perhaps, and if the Democratic party really cared about the environment, they wouldn't fly in jets and use so much hair spray. Politicians are almost all liars and hypocrites. So, what's your point? Also, for those who believe that personhood is established just after conception, day after pills won't solve much.

Not all Republicans are evangelicals

This is true. But they are still dependent on Evangelicals for their vote.

White evangelical Protestants have been one of the most faithful Republican constituencies in presidential elections in recent years, voting overwhelmingly for GOP candidates. In 2004, for example, 79% of white evangelicals supported President Bush, while just 21% supported his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. White evangelicals also accounted for a third of Bush's total votes that year.

http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Young-White-Evangelicals-Less-Republican-Still-Conservative.aspx

To claiming that they're delusional is insulting and unnecessary

If I say I am talking to an invisible person, I would be called delusional. If you say you're talking to an invisible God, I don't think you should be treated any differently.

Do you honestly believe that conservatives are the only politicians who flip-flop or vote for popular issues with which they secretly disagree?

McCain flipped on: Bush taxes and Iraq war costs, privatizing social security, habeas corpus, catering to agents of intolerance (like Falwell), progressive tax fairness... this is called an abdication of principles, or a sign that you didn't have any in the first place.

As far as the abortion issues go, that's what is comes down to: do you believe a woman's body belongs to the government? If no, then when do you think a fetus has the rights of a human being? If you say the second after an egg is fertilized, I call bullshit, especially if you believe in some cult or another. If abortion is murder, then God has a few hundred thousand years of infanticide on his hands.

If the Republican party really cared about preventing abortion, they'd make condoms and day after pills free. But what they really care about is the political advantages anti-abortionism provides them. They'd rather have the abortions continue so you'll be more willing to write them a check.

Doing the right thing and acting decently may cost a little more today, but it pays off in terms of long term sustainability of a company. Ultimately, "being evil" has a cost. Preserving your company's reputation long term is something you can do for your investors, and that's only done by setting clear principles and then steadfastly sticking to them. For a site like Facebook, one of those principles should clearly be "We will not interfere with what our users want to post, unless they are doing something illegal", ....

Good and Evil are relative terms. I'm not a Muslim, so I'm guessing at this: From their perspective, a company that disrespects the government's official religion is considered "evil." Reasonable assumption, no? So your comments are valid from this alternative perspective in that "being evil" is detrimental to long term business. I'm sure #Fuckerberg has plans to have the 1.6 billion Muslims in this world view advertisements and be more "open" just like everyone else. From a business perspective, your concept of a good business could potentially alienate 23% of the world, and that's just bad for a capitalistic business.

As an aside, what I haven't seen mentioned is if the people posting death threats were banned from Facebook? Now that's a juicy tabloid story just waiting to happen! :P

Just to put some numbers behind my bloviation: Pew has a relevant set of surveys(PDF, 8MB).

The punchline, for those who don't care to plowthrough it(you should, it's worth a read) is pretty much as follows: they ranked all the countries they could get data for on two axes. 1. State Restrictions. 2. Social Hostility.

In broad strokes, communist or post-communist countries tend to have very substantial state-imposed restrictions; but rank low on social hostility. Basically, the state doesn't want competing loci of power; but the population is largely apathetic.

Your western liberal democracies, along with places like Japan, Taiwan, and Australia(which aren't really western; but otherwise does "Western liberal democracy" pretty well) tend to rank fairly low on both axes.

The middle east and north Africa rank quite high on both axes, unsurprisingly.

There are a few interesting outliers/tidbits: India, despite its democratic reputation(which is likely what keeps it to only a "moderate" State Repression index) has really high social hostility rates, just below Iraq(which takes some doing). Among countries with "Low" State Repression, Ghana has the greatest level of social hostility. Saudi Arabia is, overall, the most repressive, with high state and social scores; but has slightly lower social hostility scores than some others, probably by virtue of being fairly homogeneous.

In the USA, at least, some 83% self-report as being religious.

Honestly, at that point, I would say the 'organized religion - crime' connection falls under one of Slashdot's favorite lines 'Correlation does not imply Causation'

I'm sure people were killing each other for greed, or idiotic ideological reasons, long before it was written in stone, too.

I'd be most interested if someone did a study comparing crime rates across different religious demographics - including the atheist and agnostic. I propose that it would end up mostly flat

Wasn't apple lambasted for allowing a "Baby Shaking" app into the App Store? What church going crowd appreciates that again??

The 54% of church-goers who approve of torture?

Go back a couple hundred years and people believed all sorts of weird things.

And this changed how?

One in 10 Americans still think Obama is Muslim

or, even more amusing ...

In the United States, 81 percent believe in heaven and 70 percent in hell and the devil. (2005)

CC.

Go back a couple hundred years and people believed all sorts of weird things.

And this changed how?

One in 10 Americans still think Obama is Muslim

or, even more amusing ...

In the United States, 81 percent believe in heaven and 70 percent in hell and the devil. (2005)

CC.

I would suggest that a lot of this has to do with people in the "bible belt" taking your attitude, and keeping quiet.

Here, a quick Google finds this study -- even if you include "religious unaffiliated" as a religion, that still leaves 10.3% of the population either explicitly atheist/agnostic, or without religion.

For comparison: Even in the Bible Belt, people are starting to accept homosexuality. They might not like it, and they might not like gay marriage, but they're willing to at least accept that it doesn't make a person inherently wrong.

And according to another quick Google, and another website that is clearly biased towards "traditional values", only 2.3% are homosexual.

You can run the numbers yourself, but either way, 10.3% is kind of a huge number. That's some 31 million people in this country.

I'm not saying that we should be mocking religion, but I do think it might be a good idea for atheists to "come out of the closet", so to speak. We're more hated than homosexuals, and we're a larger group. Really, the only reason the "bible belt" can remain so willfully ignorant is because they haven't been exposed to it.

Nope, at least 58% self-identify LDS.

One of Utah's local papers did some research into LDS demographics (unfortunately, the article's only available from a pay archive, but the abstract in the search results contains the meat of the article).

The church itself claims 72% (certainly some of this claim is showmanship, but still...).

So, no. There are not as many non-members as there are members.

Here's a good website that outlines the stance of our presidential candidates. http://pewforum.org/religion08/compare.php?Issue=Stem_Cell_Research

Has anyone actually come out against stem cell research?

Democrats all seem to favor stem cell research. But among Republicans it's mixed:

• Giuliani favors expanding stem cell research.
• McCain and Romney oppose research using cloned human embryos but not embryos left over from fertility treatments.
• Huckabee only favors continuing research with existing lines.
• Hunter, Keyes, Tancredo, and Thompson oppose embryonic stem cell research.
• Paul opposes funding stem cell research (but for econo-libertarian reasons rather than religious/moral ones. If you generalize from his stated position about stem cells, he apparently would oppose most federal funding for science and medicine).

Source: The Pew Forum (except the Ron Paul parenthetical).

"Why don't you care?"

Because 79% of Americans think Jesus is going to come out of the clouds one day and end the universe as we know it.

http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=153

Exit Poll Results - The "God Gap" Widens

In recent years, some have asked whether the Democratic Party has a serious "God problem" - an inability to appeal to evangelicals and other highly religious Americans. But the results of this year's election raise the parallel question of whether the Republican Party can appeal to non-Christians and less religious voters. Exit polls find that the Democrats' gains were concentrated among non-Christians and secular voters, indicating an even larger political divide between highly religious voters and the rest of American society.

The GOP held on to voters who attend religious services more than once a week, 60% of whom voted Republican compared with 61% in 2002. A majority (53%) of those who attend church at least once a week also supported Republicans. But less frequent churchgoers were much more supportive of Democrats than they were four years ago. Among those who attend church a few times a year, for instance, 60% voted Democratic, compared with 50% in 2002. And among those who never go to church, 67% voted Democratic; four years ago, only 55% did so. As a result, the gap in Democratic support between those who attend church more than once a week and those who never attend church has grown from 18 percentage points in 2002 to 29 points today.

...

Though white evangelical voters have been the bedrock of the GOP throughout this decade, many wondered in the days leading up to the election if the party's troubles this year would hurt their prospects with this key voter group. But the GOP actually did very well among white evangelicals in 2006: 72% voted Republican in races for the U.S. House nationwide, and they gave strong support -- about two-thirds or more -- to Republican Senate candidates in several key states, including Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and Virginia. These levels of support are comparable to those registered by evangelicals in 2004, when approximately 75% voted for Republican congressional candidates.

...

Most Americans (60%) - including majorities of white mainline Protestants (56%), black Protestants (84%), white Catholics (60%) and seculars (72%) -- say they are happy that the Democrats won the election. Only among white evangelicals did as many express unhappiness as happiness with the Democrats' victory (41% each).

Similarly, by a 50%-21% margin, Americans say they approve of Democratic congressional leaders' policies and plans for the future. Nearly half of white mainline Protestants (48%) and majorities of black Protestants, white Catholics and seculars express approval of the Democratic agenda. White evangelicals express much lower approval for the Democrats' plans, but nearly as many evangelicals express approval (32%) as disapproval (37%). And majorities of all religious groups, including 57% of evangelicals, expect the Democrats to be successful in getting their programs passed into law.

The problem is that moderate people who value faith let extremists off the hook. If faith is a good thing, then extreme faith must be extremely good, even if it's destructive.

I definitely disagree with that statement. See the following set of polls: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=174

If you take Democrats to be correct that the 2006 election was a referendum on the Iraq war, then people of "stronger" faith (more frequent churchgoers) supported Republicans more strongly in 2006 than other demographic groups. While the link between Iraq and terrorism was originally tenuous at best, much of the violence in Iraq today is being perpetrated by extremists, and those who support continuing our efforts in Iraq do so because they feel that Iraq would fall to extremists (a la Iran, Syria, and possibly Lebanon) if we were to leave today. That's hardly "letting extremists off the hook".

"Blacks are twice as likely as whites (62% vs. 31%) to say that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, and this is significantly higher than among Hispanics (38%) and other non-whites (32%) as well."

http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=29

That's a lot of fundamentalists in my opinion.

You mean like NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, NPR, Various Publishing Houses

The New York Times and Washington Post have been reliably conservative on foreign policy. They're reliable supporters of Israel; they've were unquestioning of the Iraq war until recently (if they'd done their jobs and revealed Bush's bullshit before we were up to our necks in it, the war wouldn't have happened). The front section of the Post always has a bunch of ads for fighter planes and weapons systems, after all; a bit of war is good for their sponsors business. They feature conservative voices on their editorial pages, and their reporting on economic issues skews center-right.

I don't know so much about the LA Times. CNN is also full of conservative voices. NPR is not a for-profit corporation, but has a conservative bias in its sources. "Various Publishing Houses" is vague and meaningless.

The way I figure it, 1/2 is left wing, 1/2 is right wing, and 0 represent Libertarian position.

Libertarian capitalism - which is usually what's meant by "capital L" Libertarian, the position of the the Libertarian party, is a right-wing position. Properly speaking, left and right are economic positions, being in favor of labor and capital respectively.

(It is of course possible to be a leftist or socialist libertarian, but that's "little l" libertarian.)

The Wall Street Journal is often libertarian capitalist in its bias; certainly there are a number of smaller publications, such as Reason.

"Yes, I'm saying that conservative social positions correlate with provincialism and ignorance."

That is your opinion, and is based on the kind of elitism I detest.

No, it's not just my opinion.

It's long been clear that urban areas are more social liberal than rural ones. It's harder to maintain prejudices in a more densely populated area where your neighbors are diverse.

The more educated the population of a state, the less likely that state was to vote for Bush in 2000; college graduates are much less socially conservative than people with less education.

If being in favor of education and diversity means "elitism", then I will proudly call myself elitist.

How about this, I leave you alone, you leave me alone, I won't take your money for things you don't like, and you won't take my money for things I don't like. Deal?

The leave each other alone thing is fine. The "not take my money" has the complication of figuring out just what is my money, since money - like many forms of property - a creation of the state.

Libertarian capitalists like to talk about getting the government out of "meddling" in economic matters, but when I suggest revoking government issued corporate charters, land and resource deeds, patents and copyrights, all the government interventions that make capitalism possible, they blanch.

The point isn't so much about the actual nature of Atheists or Muslims, but about the Christian perception. I cite from this poll: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=26

I'm seeing that of 2002 voting-age Americans polled, "67% felt that their religion "at least occasionally" were guided by their religion in terms of voting": http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=28. Further, the same page, it appears that more people have hang-ups against voting for an atheist than for a Muslim!

The harder thing to prove is that an agenda unaffected by things religious would actually improve the quality of life in America. Scott seems to think so. Anything said on that topic, however, would be a function of one's own vision of the optimal society.

~Ben

The point isn't so much about the actual nature of Atheists or Muslims, but about the Christian perception. I cite from this poll: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=26

I'm seeing that of 2002 voting-age Americans polled, "67% felt that their religion "at least occasionally" were guided by their religion in terms of voting": http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=28. Further, the same page, it appears that more people have hang-ups against voting for an atheist than for a Muslim!

The harder thing to prove is that an agenda unaffected by things religious would actually improve the quality of life in America. Scott seems to think so. Anything said on that topic, however, would be a function of one's own vision of the optimal society.

~Ben

Well, the fact is, that those religious freaks, whether a minority or not, have managed to convince a full 42% of Americans that evolution does not take place. So while the vast majority may in fact be "reasonable people" a large chunk of them are also deluded.

Unfortunately, it's a fairly large percent of the population. According to the latest surveys, 42% of Americans believethat life existed in its present form from the beginning of time.

This is somewhat misleading. A lot of "mainstream" Protestant denominations have no problem with evolution, and as you suggest, there are a relatively small number of fundamentalist denominations who explicitly teach Biblical literalism.

However, if you ask individuals, you get numbers like 42% of the population believe that species exist in their present form, i.e., they have not evolved over time.

You're joking, right?

If you'll re-read my post you'll see that my point was that the decline in public morality as evidenced by the crime rate, high divorce rate, etc., indicates the churches aren't getting their message across.

Second, if you check the CBS poll referenced at the top of this thread you'll see that the number of people who believe the creation story has declined since Nov, 2004 and the number of people who believe God merely guided evolution has increased. However, with "the error due to sampling" of 4 percentage points, it's hard to say for sure whether the number is really down or even if it is really still above 50%

Another recent poll shows 42% of the respondents support the creationist position on evolution. Although even the latter number is amazingly high, it may just as easily indicate that the churches have reached the limit of their influence on this particular issue.

There's some evidence that church attendance is declining and has been overstated in the past, which would account for the effort by some churches to push their message into public schools. If church attendance was strong and rising, there would be no need to get into a constitutional fight over public education.

In any case, regardless of the success of the churches in fighting evolution and supporting certain politicians, their moral influence, which is their primary mandate, is clearly in decline. If they think that watering down science education is going to reverse that trend, they're probably mistaken.

Sadly, the "space bending" (lensing) that you're talking about is different than the theoretical model I'm talking about.

OK, I see what you're getting at - how do we know we're not living on a torus or a trumpet or something? You're right that we can't measure these things directly - however, as the linked article shows, we can make some fairly strong deductions based on things like the distribution of cosmic radiation. The fact that our instruments are in the universe isn't really an issue, in the same way that living on the surface of the Earth doesn't mean you can't show it's round (just look at the horizon).

You're right that there are parts of cosmology that currently can't be tested or examined in any meaningful way. In these cases, you're also right that the theories are not scientific and, as such, I would not expect them to be taught to kids in science class. When we've figured out a number of tests that could prove the theories wrong, then we can start teaching them in science classes.

An aside: To my knowledge no one knows what causes gravitational lensing

No, gravitational lensing is pretty thoroughly understood - it's a direct consequence of General Relativity. The dark matter thing you're talking about is an attempt to test the existence or otherwise of MACHOs - weakly interacting massive particles - that, if passed in front of a star, tend to make it glow more brightly for a brief period by lensing the light towards us. That is an untested theory, but it's still scientific as the testing is happening pretty much as we speak. In a few years the predictions of the theory will either be refuted or confirmed. If the latter, we can then start looking for new tests of the theory. By contrast, no-one has even figured out how to develop a test for ID (that I know of - correct me if I'm wrong).

The point, I think, with Kansas is that the schools shouldn't discount the -possibility- of intelligent design.

Oh, I completely agree. They still shouldn't be teaching a nonscientific theory in a science class though.

I don't know exactly to what extent ID is covered in the science classes of Kansas, but surely we're not so insecure about the foundations of our science that we don't think it can hold up to a teacher saying "...and there may be a God involved"?

Very few people are insecure about the foundations of science, but many are justifiably concerned over the fact that about 3/4 of Americans think that one of science's most powerful, best tested theories is complete bollocks. We don't want to give these people any more rope with which to hang themselves (unless we're really really keen on Darwinian evolution :-P)

Plus, it sets a very bad precedent. What happens when the flat-earthers start demanding equal time in geography classes in an attempt to "teach the controversy"? And don't get me started on those "intelligent falling" nutters ;-)

"We actually don't have substantial evidence (fossil or otherwise) that mutation ever caused inter-species changes"

Come again? There's been more than adequate observation of speciation and how the ID proponents get to continually say that there isn't simply blows my mind.

This whole discussion about ID in science is baffling. That it's even allowed to be considered speaks volumes about Joe and Jane Average's intelligence.

Here are some alarming numbers on Creationism (ID)/Evolution. Only 26% believing in evolution with 42% believing that humans have existed as we do now from our very inception.

"Ignorantia legis non excusat."

Given the secrecy of laws you'll pardon me for missing the legal interpretation where John Ashcroft repeals the Magna Carta and re-established the Divine Right of Kings and Bushes.

I guess we're going to nice simple system, easy-to-understand, based on only two precepts:

• Might makes right.
• It's money that matters.