Saffron wrote:

DWill wrote:Steve Chapman
Chicago Tribune
http://theweek.com/article/index/223252 ... uo-america

One cannot use the link to get to the article without having a subscription -

Then you must subscribe to The Week! I'm sure I've said it before, it's my favorite magazine, so succinct, so fun to page through.

Dave The Marine wrote:Interesting discussion, but is it secularism that has caused this? Where is your proof? Are the people in Mississippi that are going to church the sameones who are committing the murders? If you say "shazam" and an apple falls from the tree did you cause it? I think we might be assigning an effect to something that may or may not be its cause. Michigan is a blue state, and Detroit is the bluest of its cities and they also have one of the highest murder rates nationally and have for years. Methinks your evidence is weak.

Anyone who thinks that everything has gotten worse is just as wrong as those who think everything has gotten better. While we have improved in some areas like racial equality which some have already pointed out, we have slide back in areas like politiness and civility in public and in public discourse as was pointed out by lady of shallot. When someone says they would like to recapture some of the things lost from the past, I don't think like some that they want to bring back the bad but to bring back the good we have lost without losing the good that we have been able to achieve.

That's a good point. The writer was, though, only fending off what he thinks is a common outlook of social conservatives--that our social problems are due to godlessness and liberalism. He's pointing out the weakness of that generalization by asking how that could be if the social problems are bad in the most religious and conservative places.

Interbane wrote:

False

That is relative to each person, and the specific context of their lives.

What is relative to each person? That the modern age is better than 100 years ago? Wouldn't each individual necessarily need to be alive with the same mindset 100 years ago to be able to make the comparison to say that it's relative? That's nonsensical ant.

There are markers that can be detected by surveys. If the markers compare apples to apples, where, precisely, do you suggest there is some relative correlation? And relative to what?

We do need to have comprehensive data of all sorts to be able to somehow say that we are better off in some average way than was the case a couple centuries ago. It's a massive project, and is the data even available, since we don't have any way of getting the subjective views of the long dead?

DWill wrote:

Saffron wrote:

DWill wrote:Steve Chapman
Chicago Tribune
http://theweek.com/article/index/223252 ... uo-america

One cannot use the link to get to the article without having a subscription -

Then you must subscribe to The Week! I'm sure I've said it before, it's my favorite magazine, so succinct, so fun to page through.

Yes, but subscriptions cost money, but wait, I do have a birthday coming up!

Saffron, I thought about that part of what I said after I was at work that nite, and honestly couldn't remember if you mentioned the association of liberalism with secularism (by liberalism I mean in the current since, not in the since as was used in the 17 and 18 hundreds). DWill didn't make that association though some think they are the same, I agree they are not necessarly the same and would like to retract the last statement I made in reference to blue states as something that I asserted with out proof. Which was essentially what my critizism of DWill was when he emplyed that church attendance and murder were connected in the "Bible Belt" of which Mississippi is a part. There probably is a reason why Mississippi's murder rate is so high and why Detroits is so high. My guess is it has little to nothing to do with religion and has far more to do with culture and education. That said I stand firmly behind everything else I said.

Unfortunately I was unable to read the article and was only commenting on DWill's post. As for the fact that he was pointing out how bad things happened in so called "religious or conservative places" , that doesn't really hold any logical water either as they could merely assert that the people doing the mischief have been influenced by the godless liberalism (progressive) media that one is surrounded with even in the most socially conservative of places. Again, we would have to know something about the individuals who are doing the bad things (murder etc.) and see what it was that influenced them. That said I somehow doubt that either god or chris hitchen was the influence of any of them.

Dave, you've taken the thoughts of Steve Chapman as my own. Maybe I should have used a quote box. I do agree with what he says, but he doesn't say that high rates of church attendance and murder are in a causal relationship. He's just trying to expose the total lack of thinking in the view that liberalism or secularism is the cause of the perceived moral decay. How could it be, when some states with high church attendance come out worse regarding social health than do other states whose people are less religious?

Again that statement

"but he doesn't say that high rates of church attendance and murder are in a causal relationship. He's just trying to expose the total lack of thinking in the view that liberalism or secularism is the cause of the perceived moral decay. How could it be, when some states with high church attendance come out worse regarding social health than do other states whose people are less religious?"

implies a correlation that I think doesn't exist between religious belief and social health. It could just as easily if less comfortably (at least from the politically correctness of our age) be blamed on culture factors. Plus, if you take my example of Detroit and spread it out to the whole state of Michigan it would change the numbers because you would delute the Detroit (and possibly Flint and Lansing) numbers by the rural (and I would contend) much more religious rural parts and smaller cities. Thus, lowering the crime rate (violent or otherwise). I am relitively sure this could be done in these so called more secular states as well. I would like to see the hard numbers and know where this person who wrote the article got his numbers. Statistics are easily manipulated and people sometimes extrapolate things from them that they don't really support, its somewhat how our minds work looking always for a reason even though it may just be the roll of the dice.

DWill wrote:Dave, you've taken the thoughts of Steve Chapman as my own. Maybe I should have used a quote box. I do agree with what he says, but he doesn't say that high rates of church attendance and murder are in a causal relationship. He's just trying to expose the total lack of thinking in the view that liberalism or secularism is the cause of the perceived moral decay. How could it be, when some states with high church attendance come out worse regarding social health than do other states whose people are less religious?

Have you read the book, "How to lie with Statistics"?

Just asking, that's all.

Steve Chapman was exposing a fallacy. To do that, he pointed out situations obviously inconsistent with the belief that secularism is the cause of social pathology. That is not equivalent to him claiming that secularism is responsible for some better social outcomes in some states compared to others. Don't you see, if he used such shoddy reasoning, he would be doing exactly what he led off complaining about--and there would be no point to his piece.