Good article and reference. The absolute authority that religion invokes provides cover and empowers all sorts of mischief that would otherwise be seen and rejected for the less than civilized behavior it sometimes is. Suffering is God’s will. Why be concerned about it?

I’m skeptical a bit of the study because it reinforces what I already believe. I’d like to see this topic studied more, because I think it would dispute the almost axiomatic claim of religions that religiosity makes people better. Maybe attention would then shift to what actually works to make better societies.

Of course, and Paul makes no claim to have uncovered a hitherto-unknown law of social dysfunction. But there’s a lot of coincidence happening in his data, and it demands some further looking into. Your comment about crime within the Muslim population of France attributes that crime rate to that population’s relative poverty. But that’s just another correlation. I would suspect, on the evidence from the cross-cultural data presented in the Paul study, that the crime statistic you refer to might have more to do with the religiosity of the population under study than their poverty. France has pockets of non-Muslim poor - people from Southern Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe. How do the crime rates of those populations, adjusting for poverty rates, compare with those of the Muslim population?

I’m all for eliminating poverty, and I do believe that the wide (and increasing) gap between the very very rich few and the massive numbers of poor has more to do with social dysfunction than religiosity does. But I also believe that religiosity (especially as it’s preached and practiced in America’s evangelical megachurches) has a lot to do with the inequitable distribution of wealth. When people are taught that great wealth is God’s reward to those who have pleased Him, then any progressive legislation to reduce the inequity in the distribution of wealth smacks of Satanism.

Richard