WARNING! Religion may cause...

The next was a Pew global survey that graphed the correlation between religiosity and wealth. Although the U.S. was an outlier, there was still an inverse statistical correlation between rates of religious belief and wealth. Attached to that article was a site you can use to determine rates of religiosity in different areas of the US and the corresponding population data. (It is slightly dated with 2000 as the year the data was collected.) There is a similar correlation in the US among different areas as there is among countries worldwide. Below are the two graphs plotting the data.

The third and final study is perhaps the most comprehensive. Phil Zuckerman analyzed levels of organic (not coercive) atheism and how the countries scored on the "Human Development Index," which rates countries on various indicators of societal health such as homicide rates, gender equality, poverty, literacy, and infant mortality. Not surprisingly, higher levels of atheism have a positive correlation to better levels of societal health as measured by these statistics. The top 25 countries all have very high levels of non-believers with the exception of Ireland. There was an increase in suicide rates among some of the atheistic countries, but the author notes that all of those countries were formerly parts of the USSR and are still suffering from the effects of that. (nb: The link to the study itself is gone, but it is available in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism)

So, due to the insistence of numerous people, I have been working on a more official thesis on theism as a mind disorder, but getting the actual studies often requires expensive memberships or trips to the library. Don't worry-it's coming. Even if you disagree on that point, I think that there's enough data here to support the claim that religion has deleterious effects on society. One should use caution while using religion until one is certain of its effects.

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