In Reply to: re: re: re: caption competition posted by tiempo presente on August 24, 2009 at 13:19:58:

Yes perhaps they are getting sense here - nobody said religious practice wasn't declining in Ireland. But really the decline in Mass going and religious practice here has a lot to do first of all with hypocrisy of the religious establishment - Bishop Casey and his innocent escapade starting the ball rolling. But then more seriously with clergy abusing children on a horrific scale. Religious abusing children and religious superiors attempting to cover it up. Of course mass attendance has gone down. Doh!

But my point was that comparing Finland and Ireland for 2004 and a more recent survey of what is called 'religiosity' (in a serious academic sociology journal) people in Finland do not pray as often as people in Ireland - hence Ireland is still more religious than Finland - and indeed even more religious again than countries such as Sweden, Denmark, France, Norway or a number of other countries. But Finland and Ireland were similar in size and wealth in 2004.

You could extend this to the USA which by the same indicators is a VERY religious country nowadays, in spite of the best efforts of the founding fathers. The homicide rate in the USA is much, much higher again than Finland or Ireland - but it's all okay because they pray more than we do? Even there the number of financial and sexual scandals associated with their mega-tv-church impresario pastors is impressive evidence that they religion brings out the worst in people.

So the argument is that religiosity is not just directly correlated with murder and mayhem but is a root cause of violent crime. Religion appears to bring out the worst in people if you measure this by their tendency to kill or cause violent harm to their fellow human beings.

Of course there's plenty of historical evidence to support this view that religion incites violence and hatred too - we all know that Man is quite capable of murdering his brother - Cain and Abel have a whole section to themselves in the old testament, for example.

The instances where the other person's religion is specifically the reason for killing them are many (to put it mildly).

Religion has explicitly been widely used as a reason for killing others: The Crusades, the Inquisition, millions wiped out on religious grounds more recently too - Armenia, the Holocaust, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, 9/11, and so on and on - religious wars are many and varied and millions have suffered.

There's even an old view (and this one is not mine at the risk of instigating the new Irish blasphemy laws) that Jesus would have been the first eugenicist - see link below. His flogging of the Jews out of the temple is also explicitly cited by Hitler as one of his main justifications for the holocaust.

Ergo Yer man is really saying 'Watch out for that religion stuff'. I think I should win the caption prize.

• Preaching Eugenics 1922