Barna Research Group: Atheists Divorce Less, Commit Fewer Crimes Than Christians

Today's posts may seem disproportionately rough on "godly Christians," but there just seems to be a plethora of stories that underscore the hypocrisy and batshit craziness of the so-called Christian Right.  As a number of previous posts have set forth, states with gay marriage have lower divorce rates than anti-gay Bible Belt states.  Likewise, studies have shown that evangelical Christians have the highest divorce rates of any religious groups/denomination.  Now, a new study by the Barna Research Group - a conservative Christian organization - confirms that atheists have a lower divorce rate than the "godly Christian" crowd.   Here are highlights via The New Civil Rights Movement:

An Evangelical Christian pollster finds that atheists commit less crimes, divorce less, and are better educated than their fellow Christians. “It is obvious that you do not have to believe in a higher power in order to live a moral and successful life. Quite the opposite,” the Knoxville News‘ Al Westerfield writes of the study, adding that “the groups with the highest crime rate, the poorest marriages and the lowest education continually strive to force their beliefs on the nonreligious. And the politicians pander to them. Why else would they pass laws to put religion in the schools and on courthouse facades? And then they wonder why the godless could possibly be upset.”

“According to a Barna Research Group report, fundamentalist Christians have the highest divorce rate, followed by Jews and Baptists,” Westerfield writes:

The godless are tied with Catholics and Lutherans for the lowest divorce rate. It seems that some groups that claim to follow the Bible most strictly are not putting their money where their mouths are. The godless who are thought to be without morals seem to take their vows more seriously.

Some groups seem to like their flocks ignorant so that pastors’ interpretations of God’s edicts are not questioned. Other groups prize scholarship and achieve more in their lives here on Earth.

In fact, a review of worldwide studies found that criminality and religion go hand in hand. The countries with the most religious people have the highest crime rates, highest sexually transmitted diseases and the highest teen pregnancy rates.

This is also true in the United States. The more religious a state’s population, the higher the crime, STD and teen pregnancy rates.

The hypocrisy is mind numbing.  Why do politicians give a damn about what these ignorant, promiscuous and  obviously unfaithful folks have to say about anything?  Oh, I forgot.  These folks are today' Republican Party.

Did Colonialism Help Launch the AIDS Epidemic?

Back in October I wrote in a VEER Magazine column about information reported by the New York Times in a book review of “The Origins of AIDS,” published by Cambridge University Press, and written by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. The piece suggested that there were a number of factors involved - including prostitution and unsanitary medical conditions - in the unlikely spread of a rare virus. The piece also made it clear that Belgian and French colonial policies also played a role as did corrupt and unsanitary procedures in a Hatian plasma center that exported plasma to the USA.. Now, a new article in the Washington Post places even more blame on colonial policies and the population upheavals that colonial trade triggered. Here are some highlights:

We are unlikely to ever know all the details of the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But a series of recent genetic discoveries have shed new light on it, starting with the moment when a connection from chimp to human changed the course of history.

We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of dense forest in southeastern Cameroon. We know when: within a couple of decades on either side of 1900. We have a good idea of how: A hunter caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during butchering.

For decades nobody knew the reasons behind the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But it is now clear that the epidemic’s birth and crucial early growth happened during Africa’s colonial era, amid massive intrusion of new people and technology into a land where ancient ways still prevailed. European powers engaged in a feverish race for wealth and glory blazed routes up muddy rivers and into dense forests that had been traveled only sporadically by humans before.

The most disruptive of these intruders were thousands of African porters. Forced into service by European colonial powers, they cut paths through the exact area that researchers have now identified as the birthplace of the AIDS epidemic. It was here, in a single moment of transmission from chimp to human, that a strain of virus called HIV-1 group M first appeared.

In the century since, it has been responsible for 99 percent of all of the world’s deaths from AIDS — not just in Africa but in Moscow, Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, New York, Washington.

Once the virus made the jump from chimp to human, a single infected person could have carried HIV down the Sangha, onto the Congo River and into Kinshasa. The Belgians had founded the city in 1881, during what historians call “The Scramble for Africa,” when colonial powers carved up the continent into areas of influence. By the early 20th century Kinshasa, then called Leopoldville, was the biggest city in Central Africa, fueled by the dizzying growth of trade with the outside world.

[A]s scientists plotted out the genetic histories of these varieties and built an extensive family tree for HIV, they all appeared to have spread from a single explosion, a big bang of the AIDS epidemic: Ground Zero was Kinshasa.

The only obstacle to European companies’ reaping huge profits was that collecting ivory and rubber required massive amounts of labor. . . . . The solution to the manpower demands soon became obvious. Colonial powers created what was essentially slavery: cheap muscle at the point of a gun. . . . . That meant African porters had to carry goods and supplies anyplace the steamboats couldn’t reach.

All these roles were filled by Africans, many imported from villages hundreds or even thousands of miles away. African life here was beyond cheap. It was disposable. Contemporary accounts by journalists and missionaries tell of colonial officials across the Congo Basin ordering mass slaughters and the torching of restive villages while creating forced settlements that resembled nothing so much as concentration camps.

Ominously, something else followed the rubber trade through Cameroon: disease. Sleeping sickness, smallpox and skin infections were the most obvious. . . . . Colonial authorities attempted mass inoculation campaigns for smallpox and set up quarantine zones that restricted where the porters were allowed to travel. But even so, the diseases spread.

[I]t’s clear that colonial commerce created massive new networks of sexual interactions — and massive new transmissions of infections. (In later decades, transmission through the reuse of hypodermic needles in medical care probably had some role in HIV’s spread as well.)

To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce. It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.

So the improbable journey of the killer strain of HIV was feasible for only a few hectic decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s. Without “The Scramble for Africa,” it’s hard to see how HIV could have made it out of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of millions of people. Even a delay might have caused the killer strain of HIV to die a lonely death deep in the forest.

Regardless of the cause identified with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it goes without saying that HIV/AIDS has been a tragedy for humanity.

Abstinance Only Sex Education Proves Ineffective Yet Again

A new Centers for Disease Control reports indicates that during the Chimperator's delusional reign when evangelicals drove sex education policy unwanted pregnancies and the transmission of STD's increased - in some case markedly. Sticking one's head in the sand and rejecting positive programs that have proven effective elsewhere is one of the signature idiocies of the Christianists. Science and objective reality are thrown in the trash bin as religious zealotry dictates all policy. Nor surprisingly, the Bible Belt region had the highest incidences of pregnancies and new HIV cases on a per capita basis. I hope Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and the other professional Christians are proud of their handiwork. The larger public needs to roundly condemn the education policies of these flat earth types and let their elected officials know that they support a fact based comprehensive sex education policy in the schools. Here are some highlights from the Guardian:
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Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body. In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. . . . The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.
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The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

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Although the CDC does not attribute a cause, groups that support comprehensive sex education have seized on the report as evidence of the failure of religiously-driven policies that shy away from teaching about contraception in favour of emphasising avoiding sexual contact. Planned Parenthood said the CDC report is "alarming" and confirms that teenagers need "medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education".

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The Christian Taliban has no place in setting sex education policy in the public schools. Ignorance is not the way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and STD's.

Guess Where Sexually Transmitted Disease Occurs the Most

UPDATED: I checked out the full story ay the link below and all of the rleated maps of the seven deadly sins and for the most part the highest incidence for each is concentrated in the Bible Belt.

Kudos to Bob Felton for this terrific find. As Bob notes:

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When Kansas State geographers decided to map the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States at county level they discovered — What do you know? — that they occur with the greatest frequency throughout the Bible Belt. Nobody should be surprised. The Christian denigration of sex (see Calvin and marriage) doesn’t suppress sex, it merely sends it into unwholesome underground channels. And so much, once again, for the ‘family values’ schtick.

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The hypocrisy and damage done by those who seek to police the morals of everyone else is stunning.