The Dark Side Of "The Dark Side Of Faith"

An opinion piece was published in today's Los Angeles Times, to which the following pertains.

A writer has recently claimed, in an article entitled, "The Dark Side of Faith", that religious extremism in America is dangerous. The claim was based on a new study that alleged that sinful behavior was more prevalent in the more religious areas of the United States.

It is my considered view that the writer's claim is nonsense, because while it may be true that some aspects of religious faith seem incompatible with what actually occurs in a practical sense, the writer seems to fail to understand that religion is not for the perfect, or even the noble. Religion is particularly needed for sinners. So, given the premise evident from the reliance on the study's claim, there is no real reason to believe or even read the article, other than to be specific about why the premise and conclusion are fairly misdirected. The facts are what they are. But let us review some of what the writer wrote, nevertheless, and what was taken as a gloss upon it.

[The study] ranked societies based on the percentage of their population expressing absolute belief in God, the frequency of prayer reported by their citizens and their frequency of attendance at religious services. He then correlated this with data on rates of homicide, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, abortion and child mortality. He found that the most religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages of atheists and agnostics. Of the nations studied, the U.S. — which has by far the largest percentage of people who take the Bible literally and express absolute belief in God (and the lowest percentage of atheists and agnostics) — also has by far the highest levels of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Here is a particularly banal observation in my view:

The claim that religion can have a dark side should not be news. Does anyone doubt that Islamic extremism is linked to the recent rise in international terrorism? And since the history of Christianity is every bit as blood-drenched as the history of Islam, why should we doubt that extremist forms of modern American Christianity have their own pernicious and measurable effects on national health and well-being? Arguably, Paul's study invites us to conclude that the most serious threat humanity faces today is religious extremism: nonrational, absolutist belief systems that refuse to tolerate difference and dissent. My prediction is that right-wing evangelicals will do their best to discredit Paul's substantive findings. But when they fail, they'll just shrug: So what if highly religious societies have more murders and disease than less religious societies? Remember the trials of Job? God likes to test the faithful.

The absurd argument that is made is that since Christianity once was excessive, therefore nothing that advocates Christianity today can be freed from that stain, such, and to the extent, that Christianity today can be compared to the worst of Islamic extremism. This hateful approach would consider America itself irremediably evil, since the South once held slaves.

There is truly nothing new under the sun, and religion- and America-bashing are apparently the only remaining acceptables prejudice among some opinion-meisters at the Times.