Aqui fica um comentário (bastante crítico), que refere um estudo
interessante sobre a influencia da religião no bem da sociedade:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-10/23monbiot.cfm
Texto Integral:
October 23, 2005 Better Off Without Him
By George Monbiot
Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy
question for athiests to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people
up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do
so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to
harm insects setting light to human beings.
A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his
church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their
bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of
prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalisation of assisted
suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of
self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind
of the believer than the infidel.
But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities
on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more
limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British,
Germans and Belgians in Africa and the British in Australia and India could
be said to have done their best).
It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if God does not exist,
then everything is permissible."(1) Nor can we wholly disagree with the new
Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism
which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."(2)
(We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent his life campaigning to
become God's go-between, and who now believes he is infallible, is immune
to such impulses).
The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets,
but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone
who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should
we care about other people's?
We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian last month, that
"good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that
heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt
that faith and charity go hand in hand."(3)
The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic missionaries. Joe Haas, an
Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West Papua, had spent his
life acting as a human shield for the indigenous people of Indonesia: every
few months soldiers threatened to kill him when he prevented them from
murdering his parishioners and grabbing their land.(4)
Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of north-eastern Brazil,
thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was a gunman the ranchers
had sent for him. Yet still he opened it. With the other liberation
theologists in the Catholic church, he offered the only consistent support
to the peasants being attacked by landowners and the government.(5) If they
did not believe in God, these men would never have taken such risks for
other people.
Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the
question with which this column began. But in the current edition of the
Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the
hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that
religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide,
non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion". He compared data from 18
developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists
couldn't have got it more wrong.(6)
"In 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 ... None of the strongly
secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of
measurable dysfunction."
Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and
Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy,
marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization,
and acceptance of evolution approach European norms".
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion -
especially absolute belief - and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and
adolescent abortion.
Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in
Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US - the most religious country in
his survey - in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis. Strangest
of all for those who believe that Christian societies are "pro-life" is the
finding that "increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive
correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... Claims that
secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore
contradicted by the quantitative data."(7)
These findings appear to match the studies of teenage pregnancy I've read.
The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired
by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy
rates(8). The US is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels
comparable to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than
India, the Philippines and Rwanda(9). Because they're poorly educated about
sex and in denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use
contraceptives), boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more
likely to get their partners pregnant than those who don't(10).
Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the rankings cannot reflect
national poverty - the US has the world's 4th highest GDP per head, Ireland
the 8th - the nations which do well in Paul's study also have higher levels
of social spending and distribution than those which do badly. Is this a
cause or an association? In other words, are religious societies less
likely to distribute wealth than secular ones?
In the US, where governments are still guided by the Puritan notions that
money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and poverty is a mark of
moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds with the dispersal of
wealth. But the UK - one of the most secular societies in Paul's study - is
also one of the least inclusive, and does rather worse in his charts than
countries with similar levels of religion. The broad trend, however, looks
clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have ... come closest
to achieving practical "cultures of life"."(11)
I don't know whether these findings can be extrapolated to other countries
and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example, at whether religious
belief is associated with a nation's preparedness to go to war (though I
think we could hazard a pretty good guess) or whether religious countries
in the poor world are more violent and have weaker cultures of life than
secular ones. Nor - because, with the exception of Japan, the countries in
his study are predominantly Christian or post-Christian - is it clear
whether there's an association between social dysfunction and religion in
general or simply between social dysfunction and Christianity.
But if we are to accept the findings of this one - and so far only - wide
survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any
sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as
Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
www.monbiot.com
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O referido estudo (mais longo) está em
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
