The very title of this thread, "Societies worse off when they have God on their side", is a bold claim, whether yours or not. That's the claim I am talking about, and the study is flawed as I showed.
I said in the beginning of this thread (as did the author of the study) that it was by no means definitive or even proved cause and effect. It was, more than anything, a initial observation or jumping off point. You didn't "prove" any flaws, you just included the HDI which it's own creator called a "vulgar measure", because of its limitations, it nonetheless focuses attention on wider aspects of development than the per capita income measure it supplanted"
The HDI measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development:
1.A long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
2. Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
3. A decent standard of living, as measured by the log of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in USD.
None of these things were the subject of the study referenced in the article which looked primarily at: murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide - all things that one might surmise would be less is societies that claim to be more religious - again the author was NOT claiming proof of cause and effect
The HDI appears to be focused on economic development while the first study looks at what could be viewed as moral or ethical development - the very thing that religion is supposed to improve
It doesn't matter. The point is that secular people, by law it seems, always bring up the Crusades and the Catholic Spanish Inquisition to criticise Christians when these secular people know very well that those conflicts were political and more about power, wealth and property than they were about religion. Yet, they fail to acknowledge that a few secular, modern people shed far more blood in much less time than the many religious people of the past. Very convenient.
You're the one who mentioned the crusades and inquisition as two things that most would think were of a religious nature yet, according to you - were more about power, wealth and property ..... yet the more modern atrocities were somehow NOT about power, wealth and property but more about the failure of secularism???
How can you have it both ways??
