Op-Ed: Think religion makes society less violent? Think again.

 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1101-zuckerman-violence-secularism-20151101-story.html

 I was especially intrigued by the op-ed piece in the LA Times by a sociologist who claims he can prove that religion is useless when it comes to securing a good quality of life. I am not going to take the trouble to rebut every single point, but it is easy to prove that at least some of what he is saying is not true—just by checking up on his alleged “facts.” For example, he claims that secular countries like Sweden have lower crime rates than more religious countries. But the US is clearly more religious than Sweden, and if you look at the data, the crime rate is far higher in Sweden than it is in the US. (Sweden had the second highest crime rate among the countries surveyed at 138.35 crimes per 1,000 people and the US ranked 22^nd at only 41.29 crimes per person.)

It is also not clear what the writer means by “religion.” People like Washington and Jefferson defined religion as a fear of God that causes people to not harm others and to not act irresponsibly for fear that God will punish them. But the countries and states that the author uses as examples of being religious don’t fit this description. For example, the author uses Mexico as an example of a religious country—presumably because of its Catholic history. But Mexico has one of the highest out of wedlock birth rates in the world, even though the Catholic Church teaches that having sex outside of marriage is a mortal sin (a sin that if not confessed will lead to eternal punishment in hell). So, based on that, I would say that there is not a whole lot of fear of God going on there. One can say the same thing about Mississippi, a state that the author holds up as one of the most religious states in the US, but has the flat-out highest out of wedlock birth rate of all the states in the U.S.

Come to think of it, could that be why there’s so much crime in Mexico and Mississippi?