Actually the phrase is "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

Yah, Ciarin has this one right. Unless it is alcoholic pudding, where proof can mean something different. Except that you would still have to eat it to matter, so even then, the “proof” would be in the pudding.

Mind you, I have never heard of such a recipe but there is some rule of the universe that if booze can be put in it, it will be. I guess that I will have to try making a batch and see what happens. Since albumin does not coagulate below about 60c, I think that the pudding will have to be made extra thick and the booze will have to be added after it cools.

We now return you to your regular thread...

who cares?

and, why not reply to the question put forth by the OP?

I think the answer to this question is that Christianty isn't doing what a lot of people think it's doing. Namely, the assertion that "America is a Christian nation" is true in statistics only.

But there are a lot of other factors that have an impact on the statistics you mentioned. I'll take them in the order you discussed them, and speak with regard to Norway, which the country I'm most familiar with.

Homicide Rate

Has anyone else noticed all of these murder-suicides in the U.S. over the past couple of months? The story is almost the same every time - the father in a family with kids gets into financial trouble and kills his family and himself. In Norway, like other Scandinavian countries, income taxes are extremely high. But those taxes allow the government to pay for all of the expensive things that U.S. residents have to save up money for - healthcare, higher education and retirement. Financial pressure is much greater on U.S. residents, and even though it's note the sole driver of homicide rates, it is certainly significant in tough economic times.

Divorce Rate

The divorce rate is lower in Norway partially because the marriage rate is lower. The marriage rate is lower because the government treats domestic partners largely the same as married couples. And again, financial pressure - also a driver of divorce - is much lower.

Teen Pregnancy and Abortion

I don't know the current state of sex education in Norway, so I can't speak to that. But I suspect the abortion rate is much lower than the U.S. due to the availability of nationalized medicine and the national employee benefits system which allows mothers and fathers to split up to 12 months of time off after the birth of a child (and still get their jobs back).

So it's not so much that Christianity isn't working - it's that socialism does work. And it's amusing in the U.S. that the right thinks socialism is such a dirty word. They speak of it as if socialism and democracy are mutually exclusive. Norway is a constitutional monarchy - essentially a democracy with a figurehead royal family. It has regular elections like every other democracy.

I blame it on abandonment of responsibility.

It's human nature to shove the fault on other people. I think Christianity only encourages this by creating an entity that controls events, allowing people to feel even further powerless in their situation (by shifting responsibility) and therefore more likely to act out.

But the OP goes beyond that, the data actually suggest that widespread Christian belief makes people less 'moral', which is a much more serious problem for Christians to accept or explain.

It does?  Does Stephen Harper have weekly consultations with conservative religious leaders to help him determine public policy?  I'm not being sarcastic.  I really don't know.  Is your government made up 100% of professed Christians?  (I know... we have one atheist in Congress... what a coup...)  Who is the Canadian equivalent of Pat Robertson, or Ted Haggart, or John Ashcroft?

For the moment, let's assume that you're correct and Canada is sharing first place among first world post-industrial nations as the most religious country.  This isn't particularly relevant to the question in the OP.  I've already pointed out the dilemma (as has Bob Spence).  If Christianity does inspire and facilitate better morals, Christian countries ought to do better than secular countries on empirical data, and they do not.  The fact that one Christian country does better than another doesn't address the question at all.

In all seriousness, Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day are probably our closest political analogues (though neither are quite as bad).

To my knowledge none of the MPs, or MPPs are atheist.

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Apperantly Dion [FORMER leader of the Liberal party] is an atheist, yet Kevin has not provided proof.

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These stats can most certaintly be used to show that Christianity does not guarentee morality.

However, to Bob's assertion, I can think of many counter examples, not just Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Union#Religiosity

Greece. [0.007/1000 murder rate, 81% Theist]

Cyrpus [2 murders, 90% Theist]

Portugal [0.02/1000 murder rate, 81% Theists]

As you can see, Greece and Cyprus DO do better than Denmark/Sweden in the murder moral department.

The point is, be VERY careful as to what you pull from stats. I am sick and tired of both Theist and atheist abusing stats.

What exactly does that prove?

Two atheist ran for election, therefore Canada isn't 77% Christian?

I wasn't using the stats to argue anything other than stats can be used both ways. The stats in the OP argue against Theism being required for morality, as the above stats can be used to argue against the opposite.

It's like trying to show that Pepsi causes people to drive red cars, or that lack of pirates causes global warming.

Does A cause B? Does B cause A? Does C cause both A and B? Is A irrelevant to B?

I probably could.

But if I really wanted to be a stuck-up bitch, I would have pointed out the suicide rates of Denmark, Sweden and Finland compared to the U.S. But that would have been ummmmm abusing stats.

I could use it to "prove" that atheism causes suicide. I of course don't believe this, but the same statistical data is there as in relation to crime rate and atheism.

Well, that is valid on it's face but only to a very limited degree. Let me use part of your own case but taken from probably better data.

The fact is that my step father was a market researcher all of his life so he spent quite a bit of time pouring over raw data. There are lots of things that show up in raw data that probably don't mean anything at all. One of his favorite examples was a correlation between pet food and jarred pasta sauce.

It has been known for decades that people who buy dog food are more likely to buy Ragu brand pasta sauce and that people who buy cat food are more likely to buy Prego brand pasta sauce. As I say, that has been evident from the data for a very long time and it does not change much from year to year. The thing is that this doesn't actually mean anything of any substance (apart from the fact that it is probably a waste of money to mail free coupons for Prego to dog owners).

Similarly, your grabbing of a very small slice of statistical information also proves only your point that statistics can be abused. If you really want to do an AvT style comparison, you would need to look at far more than a country or two. Also, you would need to match out a number of other factors to control for them.

Speaking of the other factors, the USA is a really big place. If you want to compare us fairly, then it should not be to one or two places in Europe but rather to Europe as a whole. If you want to look at individual countries, then do feel free to pull statistics for the 50 states individually.

 Again, Pineapple, you've missed the point completely.  Neither I, nor Bob, nor presumably the OP is trying to "prove" that Christianity is "bad" or that it can't or doesn't ever coincide with decent moral people.  Statistical trends do not prove principles so much as they raise good questions.  The question that you have still not addressed is this:

Given the trend across political, cultural, and geographical lines showing a distinct lack of correlation between Christianity and better morals than non-Christians, why should we believe Christians when they say their religion promotes better morals than other belief systems?

Well, it's not self-evident, but there's no evidence that Christianity either promotes or guarantees morality that is any better than any other system.  There is potentially evidence that it may contribute to less moral societies.  Given these two premises, the only responsible position is the default -- the claim by Christians that humans need Christianity to be better moral people is false.

So you agree with us, right?

I don't get why you don't get that nobody (well, nobody who's making any sense, anyway) is disputing this.  I also don't get why you don't get that this doesn't have anything to do with the question at hand.

This, Pineapple, is what I mean about how you don't express yourself well, and often don't seem to get the question.  You agree with us, and everyone is trying to tell you that you agree with us, and you don't seem to want to accept that answer, even though everyone here except you can see it plainly.

I presume the statement you disagree with was:

I assume it is my use of the word 'makes' there, implying that the Christian belief actually can have a nett negative effect itself, IOW you are accusing me of  the standard fallacious use of statistics that assumes 'correlation implies causation'. You have a point there, if that conclusion was purely based on the stats themselves. But taking into account the nature of the claim and the normal assumption of the relationship between beliefs and behavior, my statement is defensible, IMHO.

Note I did use the word 'suggest' which means I was not saying that the stats prove that Christianity makes people less moral, but it is a plausible conclusion from not just the stats in the OP, from from several other studies that have gone into this question far more thoroughly. Since Christians insist that belief makes people more moral, it is perfectly justifiable to call them out on this and suggest that they may have it backwards. 

Of course stats can be abused , but the studies on this seem to have been pretty carefully done, and the point remains, as Hamby and others agree, that these figures go beyond supporting the idea in your response to the OP, that "just because people are Christian doesn't neccesarily mean that they are moral? That seems self-evident."

In order to do that you would have to explain the stats I posted, the same if a Christian claims that atheists are less moral would have to explain Denmark and Sweden.

I can pretty much guess what it is, but we'll leave that to the post.

Since Bob seemed to have clarified, I will just dismiss his speculation as such, rather than just snark it out.

I would expect to see LOTS of calculations as to how you can rationalize this one. And that is preciously what I would have to see to be convinced. Calculations with enough data.

For example, with Sweden and Portugal we have the same murder rate/1000 and a MASSIVE deviation of Theism.

Another example, the majority of the world's population is Theist, therefore it would be expected out of statistical probability that the most immoral country [the one with the most murders for example] is populated mostly by Theists.

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Or should I say more clearly, that there may not be enough data for the atheist side, and it'll be like comparing the morality of people with red hair [a small percentage] in America to the rest of the world. So of course a few redheads will be more moral than non-redheads, and with small data that will make a huge difference, so you would need more data to show a correlation of readheads being more moral than non-redheads.

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Or your other arguments had better be kickass.

This assumes that the individual arguments are valid. I think you need to re-think what counts as "acceptable standard deviation"

So if that pans out, is the religion causing the social disfunction or is the social disfunction causing the religion?

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Bingo.

You haven't even established causation yet, you're speculating on a complex issue.

Speaking of causation, are they irrational becuase they're religious, or are they religious because they're irrational?

My point was that all you guys have is a single [I don't know how strong] correlation then massive speculation on a complex and multi-variable issue.

And I have every right to dismiss it as such. There are far too many unknowns for you to make the case.

I should have made it clearer in my last post that all those other points I was making were not based on that statistical study, but drawn from a background of reading and listening to many articles, books and discussions on the issues, quite independent of that particular set of statistics, which are just one part of a body of data which include other statistical studies, plus all kinds of other ways in which human psychology and behavior, individual and collective, is investigated.

As Hamby said.

Have you studied cognitive psych?  Do you know about false core beliefs and their impact on social functioning?  It sounds like you haven't and don't.

Let me draw you a picture of the cognitive model:

1) Children learn "reality."  This becomes more or less fixed as a permanent cognitive algorythm.

2) These algorythms are intuitively trusted by children, who are predisposed genetically to believe their parents above anyone else.  When an algorythm becomes so deeply entrenched that it becomes unconscious, it acts essentially like a filter, through which reality passes before it gets to the conscious mind.

3) After a filter becomes unconscious, as the child ages, everything will unconsciously go through the filter, and the person will make whatever sense is to be made through that filter.  

That's really all you need to know, in a nutshell.  I'll give you an example of how cognitive therapy works.  I'm using a specifically non-religious personal issue I dealt with peripherally (a friend went through therapy, and related all this to me) so that you can see how it works without your unconscious filter kicking in.

Laura (not her real name) hated, hated, hated to do any kind of housework.  This is not your normal laziness.  This is a knockdown dragout fight if her boyfriend asked her to do something simple, like clean up the dishes after he cooked, put up her own laundry, or simply not leave her stuff anywhere and everywhere it happened to land around the house.  It was a huge problem.  Oh, and forget cleaning the bathroom, cooking, sweeping, or any other chores like that.  Simply not going to happen.  Two hour fight.  No housework.

If you sat down with Laura and reasoned through how irrational her behavior was, and how destructive it was to her relationships, she understood what you were saying, but insisted it didn't apply to her because she was cooler than most girlfriends, and more than made up for her housework issues in other ways.  (I spoke to her boyfriend at length.  He assured me she was quite mistaken in this respect.)

To make a long story short, in cognitive therapy, it became obvious that Laura had grown up watching her father essentially force her mother into indentured servitude around the house, forbidding her to get part time work, and never helping at all.  She had learned that housework was demeaning.  Here, then, was the cognitive core belief that had become unconscious, but which had so altered her perception of reality:  Housework is demeaning.

Of course, there was horrible cognitive dissonance because she insisted that her boyfriend do the housework.  Wasn't she then demeaning him?  No, of course not, she would say.  It was his house she was living in, so it wasn't demeaning for him to clean his own house.  (Curiously, when she lived with her brother in a house she signed the lease in, she didn't clean either, but then... irrational core beliefs will do that to a person.)

I'm sad to say that Laura still doesn't clean up after herself.  Though the cognitive therapy helped her identify her false core belief, and though she realizes that she is acting irrationally, she has failed in her efforts to overcome her viceral reaction to being asked to clean or cook.  Her childhood indoctrination has been stronger than logic.  

Now, this is not a rant about religion.  The story I just told is absolutely true, and it's a great example of the predictions made by cognitive psychology, namely:

People who adopt false core beliefs, particularly as young children, will often have moderate to extreme difficulty as adults making rational decisions and experiencing appropriate emotions when faced with an environment which contradicts the false core belief.

Based on this prediction, we can extend the prediction to religion, which is by definition a false belief since it is non-scientific.  Though we cannot predict which person will have which problem, we have no difficulty predicting that many people will have significant problems when the cognitive dissonance of reality conflicts with their false core beliefs.

It is well and thoroughly documented that this kind of difficulty causes high levels of stress, reduced self-esteem, socialization problems, and other psychological disturbances.  People with high stress, reduced self-esteem, and problems with socialization are undeniably statistically more likely to commit crimes than those who are relatively stress free, have good self esteem, and are well socialized.

There's your prediction, straight from the psych textbook.

Interesting point. Though there is this:

Seems more like a case for the positive aspects of cognitive filters, rather than religion in and of itself. "Religious belief" is such a broad category (I would arguably, as a card-carrying [so to speak] Unitarian Universalist, be a part of the "religious" category) that saying "religious belief" is positively correlated with high self-esteem is ultimately a pretty meaningless statement.

Interesting article anyway.

I'll be interested to see Hamby's response.

This was a peer-reviewed study, I think, so he should be able to get a hold of it. And there should be responses, unless it *just* came out.