First up from the God Machine this week is an annual study published by Gallup, showing levels of religiosity by state. The report, released every year around this time, is a reminder that, whatever one's assumptions about faith in America -- about seven in 10 Americans consider themselves "very" or "moderately" religious -- there are still significant differences between states and regions (thanks to Kent Jones for the tip).
Looking at this map, put together by Gallup, the lighter colors show states with fewer religious residents, and the darker colors show the opposite. Overall, Vermont is easily the state with the smallest religious population, followed by New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, while Mississippi is on the opposite end of the spectrum, followed by Utah, Alabama, and Louisiana.
It's hard to miss the regional similarities. In the top 12 least religious states we see the entirety of New England, along with the three most Northwestern, Pacific-coast states (Alaska, Washington, and Oregon). Among the top 10 most religious states, nine are from the Southeast's so-called "Bible Belt," stretching from Oklahoma to North Carolina.
Though Gallup didn't mention it, there's also a political angle to this -- of the top 12 least religious states, President Obama won all of them except Alaska in 2012. Of the top 10 most religious states, Mitt Romney carried the entire list.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* This doesn't look good for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles: "Pressed to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to settle clergy sex abuse lawsuits, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony turned to one group of Catholics whose faith could not be shaken: the dead." Apparently, Mahoney "quietly" appropriated $115 million from a cemetery maintenance fund to help pay the church's victims.
* A Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing a bill that would "require that intelligent design and 'destiny' get the same educational treatment and textbook space in Missouri schools as the theory of evolution." It would also redefine words like "hypothesis" and "scientific theory" in a way Republicans find more politically convenient (thanks to reader R.P. for the tip).
* On a related note, a creationism measure pending in the Colorado state legislature was defeated this week. The proposal had been pushed by the Discovery Institute, which has spent several years crafting proposals intended to undermine belief in modern biology.
* And radical TV preacher Pat Robertson told his followers this week that Islam is not actually a religion, but rather "an economic and political system with a religious veneer."
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Notice how the concentrations of fundies correlates with the lower income and education levels of the mostly rural red states, as well as being the places where the populations are most likely to vote for representatives who parlay a variety of nonsensical socio-economic views and related legislation.
Utah notwithstanding, since that is mostly a reflection of the concentration of Mormons, but their superlatives aren't much better than the mid-south in a variety of areas.
Sadly, fundamentalist religious teaching and theology hasn't made much progress reconciling itself with modernity. I say let them go and form their own little colony, and the rest of us on the coasts and in the cities and metro areas can govern ourselves under rational use of facts, science and evidence without having to pander to this willfully ignorant crowd of Jesus pimps.
I think Robertson was referring to chrisianity when he said it was "an economic and political system with a religious veneer." afterall whose the richest enity in the world? the catholic church and who has used their power and influence in the USA to sway elections and push laws? again the catholic church and its strident followers
Why is devotion connected to religion? Devotion has nothing to do with religion because real devotion is pure mysticism - no matter the faith tradition. Does this measure how many fanatical religious Christians or fanatic Muslims or fanatic Jews or fanatic Hindus? What do they mean by religious devoted? Weird.
what is the point of this?
42.
limpingmoose, #31,
"What is the point of this?"
It seems to give the anti-religious a voice. I am sorry to say this, being a devout Catholic myself. It seems to make them feel better to say how ignorant and deluded believers are.
I resent the implication, frankly. I was hoping this might turn into a thoughtful theological discussion. Not gonna happen.
People like Robertson and the McReligious fundamentalists have given believers a bad name.
India, you perhaps inadvertently touched on the crux of this biscuit: Delusion. It's a very strange thing, because intelligent and well-educated people can also be delusional. I have siblings, for instance, who are college-educated and yet who believe in young earth creationism. They are entirely functional yet seem perfectly content with having a clearly unsynthesized worldview, an intellectual cognitive dissonance that I personally could not tolerate. Yet this tolerance of dissonance is virtually required to be religious, for irrefutable contradiction of many elements of religion are evident all around us. It's not necessarily ignorance that need be implied here, but delusion.
This tolerance for conflicting versions of reality goes a long way toward explaining the strong correlation of voting patterns with religiosity. The idea that po' folk would support someone who was so obviously Mr. 1% (Rmoney) and who so clearly would not look out for their interests was simply ignored, subordinated to other more powerful aspects of their fragmented judgement, in many cases associated with their religious worldview.
You identify yourself as a devout Catholic. Do you believe in the "Ascension" of Jesus? How about the "Assumption" of Mary? Do you believe in a compassionate and just god who can consign someone to eternal torture for failing to believe in the palpably untrue? Or just remove the last part of that sentence (...for failing...) and ask yourself if such a god's unbelievable cruelty and sadism can fit with the idea of compassion and justice. I could go on and on, of course, but I suspect I've made my point. Religion necessitates a willingness to tolerate an unsynthesized worldview. And without that synthesis, Katie bar the door! You can get any kind of behavior whatsoever out of people laboring under delusion and fragmented belief systems, from the Inquisition to good Christians participating in mass slaughter throughout the last 2000 years.
I strongly suspect that the vast majority of atheists (and many of the people commenting here) strive to achieve and maintain an intellectually consistent personal belief system. Many undoubtedly can hardly imagine tolerating anything else. It's not surprising that such people might express disdain for religiosity, especially since atheism is barely tolerated by so many in this society. Clearly you are often offended by such sentiments. But really, what would you expect? Should atheists pretend that delusion is on a par with reality? It's like he-said/she-said journalism. Some things are true and some are patently not. If you can't take the heat...
I wonder how much this map is affected by concentrations of "religious" people in small pockets where one church or another is particularly strong. Take Utah: a very large part of the real estate in Utah is taken up by the Navajo Nation and by government land especially as national parks or monuments. There are of course lots of Mormons in Salt Lake City and in the valleys and towns that were settled by Mormons in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The canyon where I live in Southwest Colorado was originally settled by Mormon farmers, but it is now becoming a refuge for retirees of a liberal persuasion and for gays. Those in this county who attend churches are diverse in their beliefs and affiliations. I think the Mormon and the Catholic Churches are the biggest ones in the county and are about the same size, but there are lots of other small churches which cover the spectrum from fundamental evangelical to even a Unitarian Fellowship, which may include some Buddhists and Pagans.
Many of us do not go to any church because we do not feel completely at home in an organization which tells us what to believe. That does not mean that we are not religious is the sense of having some relationship with some ultimate reality.
color the bible belt states brown to signify the degree of bull@!$%#
After comparing stats, it seems on the surface that the the greatest impact on an American's health, safety, and wealth is education. Religion appears to either have no impact or negative impact. Perhaps we should remove the tax-exempt status from pastors and give it to teachers for the greatest benefit to the country.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/
http://www.americashealthrankings.org/
http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2012/10/15/americas-best-and-worst-educated-states/
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/02/16/16985214-this-week-in-god?lite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_educational_attainment
This is the essential problem with religion, or, indeed, any unreasoning belief. The logical paths down which it leads the practitioner who begins from a flawed basic premise can be very nasty. The stories about the hoops that believers in creationism have to jump through to make their religion a science is an excellent example of this.
The problem with religion is that it lends that authenticity of God to whatever flawed thesis you believe, thus the Auto da fe, thus the wars of religion, thus all manner of inhumanity to man.
The difference between science and religion is that with science, you stop when it is obvious that your basic hypothesis is incorrect. With religion, your basic hypothesis comes from the Mouth of God and, therefore, cannot be incorrect.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
That business of redefining "hypothesis" and "theory" is apparently now widespread in the Religulous Right. I have a friend with whom I share a professional interest in what began as a hobby and became a career; so long as we stick to that stuff, we're OK and he's the kind of Christian who does come through to help people in moments of need. But through his wife he has gotten involved in Rick Warren's big megachurch down in Saddleback in Orangutang County. The last time we saw each other, through other people at the breakfast table, my story came up of being part of the last big scientific expedition to the Galapagos (1964, USN gave support to the California Academy of Sciences; there were 3,500 people living in the islands and they looked like what Darwin had seen) and brought up the finches and the rest of the proofs of evolution. He started popping up with this new "hypothesis" and new "theory" definition in arguing creationism. I corrected him about what both a hypothesis and a scientific theory is (learned long ago from my scientist father), and got the argument that those definitions were wrong. I realized we were at the "wrestling with a pig" stage and stopped.
Supposedly Warren is "enlightened" (enough for Obama to go see him and have him give the prayer in 2009 inauguration), and I hadn't heard this anti-science stuff from him, but this crap is obviously spreading throughout the Xtian Right now. It's like they just keep adopting crazier and crazier and dumber and dumberer. We really are in two different realities.
There is, also, a religious group in Northern Mali who believe the same way ol' Pat does...only they don't have the money that he does...
I long ago noted that the people who shout from the rooftops about what wonderful and devoted Christians they are, are often the same ones who will do whatever they can to enhance their own lives at the expense of the rest of us. If one is truly a follower of Christ, following His teachings, he doesn't need to talk about it--it would be evident. Religion, like one's sex life, is personal, and should remain so. But then that's just me--what do I know?
Best joke of the week: (I wish I could claim credit for this, but I can't)
Once the Pope leaves office at the end of this month, he's going to serve the Church by visiting people who live in intolerable conditions and have no way out. He's going to take a Carnival cruise.
Funny how the darker states have also all had/have something against black people. Idaho, home of the militias wearing white hoods. Utah, where they finally caved into allowing black people to go to heaven. And the southern bible belt, where they are still pissed about losing their cheap labor.
Guess I'm weird. I would think if the world was created or designed, the designer would have to be an ultimate biologist, chemist, physicist, physician, mathematician, therapist, and the most awesome scientist in the universe. Learning how things work would be the ultimate search to know the mind of the creator. Instead we get glorified stupidity.
"Learning how things work would be the ultimate search to know the mind of the creator." Actually, the early scientists, people like Francis Bacon who developed the scientific method and I think also Isaac Newton and Joseph Priestly thought that nature was God's book and that by studying nature and learning how it worked, they were reading God's book.
Most of these early scientists were still in the tradition of the Bible stories as allegories and not as literal history. They did not have a concept of history as literal truth in the sense that we do. Now history is a scientific study that carries the same kind of proof as science. There has to be some sort of evidence that an event actually happened for it to be considered historically true: some sort of physical evidence as in anthropology or contemporary documents such as letters or records. This concept of history did not become the norm until into the 19th Century.
So it is not just the study of science in the sense of biology or physics that threatens those with fundamentalist religious beliefs but also history as a science. There is not one shred of evidence that passes the modern test of historical proof that there ever was a person named Jesus who walked around Judea and was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilot. There does not seem to be any credible evidence of the Exodus and the forty years in the desert. And there is a mountain of scientific evidence that the Earth is several billion years old and that life has evolved. As Steven Jay Gould has said, evolution is not a theory; it is a fact. What is theoretical is exactly what drives evolution and exactly how it has progressed through the ages.
But just because the stories of the Bible or the stories of any other religion are not historical in the sense that modern historians define history, does not mean they have no meaning. As Sir Philip Sidney contended in his Defense of Poesy, the historian is stuck with things as they are/were; but the Poet can present things not just as they are but as they ought to be. History deals with what happened to particular people in particular places at a particular time. Literature deals with what happens to all people in all places at all times.
I have always thought that by insisting on a literal historical and scientific interpretation to the Bible, the churches are destroying the real meaning of the stories their religion is based on.
Years ago, I read that one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design is that while we may be "fearfully and wonderfully made" (to use the Biblical expression), we also are not perfect. Why, for example, would a Great Designer give us an appendix, which appears to serve no purpose other than to get infected. And why would a Great Designer put the esophagus and the trachea so darn close to each other? And why would a Great Designer make us as vulnerable as we are to diseases?
I suppose a fundamentalist might answer that we were once perfect until Adam and Eve sinned. . . .
Vermont has wonderful apple cider donuts!
I would think that even I as atheist understand that if he really believes the crap he is saying that he is going to burn in hell for his part of the blood diamond industry. This man is evil incarnate, greedy and corrupt as anyone on capital hill. All while screwing people who actually believe his crap.
Not to be too picky...well, yes, to be picky... the map is NOT portraying in light colors "states with fewer religious residents, and the darker colors show the opposite." The choropleth map is protraying the PERCENTAGE of religious residents within the states. Lighter colors show states with a lower PERCENTAGE of religious residents. Sorry, but my wonkiness made me do it:)
Why is it that in these studies the religious side always gets to claim the middle ground? It's a classic propaganda tactic, arguing from popularity and doing anything necessary to ensure that your "side" can claim the majority by converting a spectrum into a pair of boolean extremes and then arbitrarily drawing the dividing line where it's most convenient for their case.
I am sure that Gallup's interpretation of their results has nothing to do with their editor-in-chief's beliefs or desire to write a book using Gallup as evidence of the strength of American religiosity rather than its undeniable decline. The real "good news" is that the very fact he feels the need to make that case proves it wrong.
An interesting observation: the highest concentration is a lateral line of states across the South, but there is also a slightly less religious band extending from the left side, from Texas and Oklahoma and running up through Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Combining these states and thinking of them as an article of clothing providing modesty vs the less religious states as exposed flesh gives the visual impression not so much of a belt, but rather a pair of overalls with a single suspender strap. That seems appropriate for some reason, even the bit where the more secular Florida just hangs out obscenely.
Re: #47
Oh great! Now I have an image in my head I wish I didn't have!!!!
I have admired Sen. Bernie Sanders for quite awhile and thought I would love to have him as my Senator. Now I have another reason to wish I could move to Vermont!! Alas, my job of 26 years in on the west coast (Washington State). Our Senators are pretty good, too.
In school (eons ago) we were taught about Greek and Roman "mythology". I consider todays religions on a par with other mythologies of the past.
It is secular society, Pat Robertson, that constrains you from becoming a christian Taliban. Ever read the barbaric Olde Testament?
Funny, I always thought of Pat Robertson as a politician masquerading as a minister...
Pat Roberts is blaming Islam for all the ills of Orthodox Patriarchal Religion, but the Jews, and Christians came before, and have set the bad example by clefting the Devils Foot, the Poet Philosophy Mystery, whereby God was said (by man made religion) to place man above both Nature and Women, with the bad eschatology originated by the Jews, who had to reforge Solomon's original writings, and which has destroyed the beauty of nature, and brought man-god's Chaos to the world. Don't blame the Muslims for the Crusades, and Inquisitions imposed on all of human society, and nature, by the philosophically flawed Patriarchal Religious Origins!
If you asked them if they were "very" or "moderately" intelligent, they would claim to be that, too. What qualifies as being religious? Giving up 10% of salary to church or charities? Who does that? Volunteer work? Regular church attendance? Too much weasel room in that poll to be of any significance.