Sorry to hear that you don't like facts, but they are stubborn things.
I love facts, and the fact is that none of what you have posted that quoted me has anything to do with our society. Your response to my original post was simply the use of the leftist tactic of distract and deflect. When called on that, you refuse to acknowledge it and instead you double down just as any good leftist would.
I have come to believe that you are only a notch or two above the leftists of BLM and Antifa. They seem determined to undermine and destroy the nation that they have been the beneficiary of. Likewise, you seem determined to undermine and destroy the Christian faith, which you, whether you realize it or not, whether you will admit it or not, have been the beneficiary of. This country was founded by men whose minds were steeped in Christianity and the wisdom they had derived in part from that was what led to the form of government and society that you now enjoy.
To some degree, you are just as much a useful idiot of the globalists as are the anarchists of BLM and Antifa.
TYG, Sure I provided data at the country level, but correlation does not stop there. Within the U.S. when you break the data down at the state level, the same correlation exists. As an example, the more religious a state the higher the teenage pregnancy rate and the lower the per capita incomes.
Nice try, but those statistics, if true, mean nothing and you know it. To be valid, they'd have to compare teenage pregnancy rates or per capita income between the churched and un-churched. Even that would not suffice, you'd really need to have comparative behavioral profiles across peoples' entire lives. A churched, unwed teenage mother might, as a result of her upbringing, live the remainder of her life in a way that is pleasing to God. An un-churched one might become a Christian despite not having been raised in church. And since when has income become a measure of good or bad behavior?
Your post was simply more distraction and deflection.
Not at all.
If your hypothesis was true, we'd see the results in the real world. Countries and states with the "most churched" people would demonstrate better markers of well being, but the reality is the exact opposite. Even when we use your method, interview people here in the U.S regarding their churchieness, we get the same results. The more fundamentalist a population, the worse the fair on measures of well being.
Since I have already pointed out the fallacy of your rejection of my "hypothesis", we are at an impasse and I see no need to continue to go in the same circle again, as you and I have done before. First you used supposed data from other countries to try to support your animosity towards church/Christianity. When that wouldn't fly and you were forced to bring it back to the U.S., you tried to use state-based "facts" and again, your post wouldn't pass muster. So, now you are claiming that "we" (you) get the same results when comparing the churched and un-churched. If you really had interviews/studies that show what you are saying, you would have led with that two posts ago. In addition, you have gone back to citing countries and states again; you are simply circling back again to the same assertions that have already been shown to be irrelevant. Frankly, I think you are full of it and are making up whatever you think you need to say to support your position. Once again, typical leftist tactics of distraction and deflection, and moving the goal posts as the game is being played; just as you do in every thread that has anything to do with Christianity. Your desperate attempts to undermine Christianity are really quite pathetic.
There's much about me you miss understand. My concerns are not specifically with Christianity, but with untrue (or believes that cannot be sufficiently demonstrated by evidence) beliefs that lead to suboptimal actions in this world. Sure, elements of Christianity are included within this definition, but the same goes for Islam, Marxism, and the various modern Gaian religions, i.e. "Climate Change".
As far as religions go, Christianity is far from the worst. Some years ago I did a study which left me with a feature rich data set of economic data across international subdivisions that already corrected for education, mineral wealth, quality of human capital, corruption, taxes etc. so I plugged in the religious break down of the various nations and ran the analysis. The results were quite interesting.
Here's the order of per capita GDP based on religion:
1. Atheist 2. Jewish 3. Christian 4. Hinduism 5. Buddhism 6. Islam 7. Folk Religions
Of course, I just measures one aspect, and there many deeper more encompassing studies demonstrating the impacts of religion on wellbeing. One important variable regarding the impact of religions is the level of fundamentalism of it's adherents. As I've said many times here on The Fire, "not all Christianity's are created equal". There's a big difference between someone like the old Scott F who used to frequent the fire, and the Young Earth Creationist, The "Happy Campers", and the Flat Earthers. Yes, the modern flat earth movement is Christian inspired.
For those interested in the an easy read that goes through the academic studies in detail, I recommend Ryan T. Cragun's "What you Don't Know about Religion (but should). He goes through the academic research with all the charts, graphs, and sources and many of these studies focus on the intensity of belief and how it impacts out comes. Spoiler alerts, it's not good for your hypothesis.
You didn't use logic or reason to get into this opinion, I cannot use logic or reason to get you out of it.
You cannot over estimate the unimportance of nearly everything. John Maxwell
