Inductivist

The General Social Survey asked respondents if it is true that: "I sometimes try to get even rather than forgive and forget." Below you see the answers by religious affiliation. 

All groups have higher rates of vengefulness than Christians, including the "nones." This makes sense since Christianity stresses forgiveness.

Among Christians, those that attend church all the time are the most forgiving. 

And nowadays many of the people with no religion like to accuse devout Christians of being the haters.  

A common claim by liberals and anti-Christians is that Christians are unhappy because the religion is repressive. 

The General Social Survey Survey asks people how happy they are overall these days with answers ranging from not too happy (1) to pretty happy (2) and very happy (3). Here are the means for various Christians and those with no religion:

All five Christian groups have higher happiness averages than the "nones." 

What about devout Christians? Maybe they are the miserable ones.

Mean happiness rises with more frequent "repression" (church attendance). 

The research literature in general reports that religiosity is associated with a wide range of positive characteristics, but that doesn't stop smug, ignorant anti-Christians from going on about how religion is harmful. 

I knew reading America's greatest philosopher, Charles Peirce, would pay off.  He has taught me the root of our current predicament.

You're baffled that supposedly intelligent people now claim there are 56 genders? Peirce informs us that the villain is William of Ockham. You say you're shocked? Isn't Ockham that awesome dude who said that the simpler is more likely to be true? Well, let me educate you. Ockham is an ass.

Plato got it wrong when he claimed that the redness we see in an apple is actually a property that exists in the World of Forms, and is only imperfectly instantiated in a particular apple. In other words, redness truly exists independently of any particular red things.

Then the greatest philosopher in the history of the world, Aristotle, said, "Master Plato, you're off your rocker." He explained that redness is a real thing but it only exists in particular objects.

Later, the Catholic Church fervently embraced Aristotle. Ockham was a devout Catholic, but he got some bad ideas from Muslim fools about God's omnipotence, and ended up concluding that what we call redness is just something humans impose on objects. To Ockham, there are just unique, particular things, and we invent classes and categories.  Do you hear a whisper here?  I can make it out: "Social construction..."

The amazing thing is that modern philosophers took Ockham and ran with it at the same time that modern science was progressing by leaps and bounds based on the old fashioned belief that there are such things as natural classifications. Not just hydrogen and helium, but male and female.

Ockham's view is called "nominalism." Aristotle's is called "realism."  Modern philosophers are generally nominalists, while scientists operate like realists, whether they know it or not.

Until now. Now we see social scientists take Ockham seriously, and it's no surprise that categories that were taken for granted for centuries are now under assault. Nominalists are ANTI-science. They tend to reduce all understanding to dust.

But you science lovers say,"We'll at least they aren't TRUE anti-science people like those evil Catholics." The truth is that in the Roman Catholic church, it is a damn HERESY to be a nominalist. I'm not kidding.

Intelligent Christianity creates the foundation for science, while the universities are trying to destroy it.

Half Sigma has done an interesting GSS analysis that shows that of the following three choices: 1) "the Bible is a book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men"; 2) "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally"; or 3) "the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word"-- a disproportionate percentage of high-IQ college graduates choose answer number 1. He concludes from the results that the Christian Right's view that liberal professors increase the skepticism of students is therefore false.

He would be correct if the Christian view were that a liberal education were the only cause of biblical skepticism. But I don't know of any Christian who claims this. A liberal education would be added to a list of other items like the influence of the wider culture--both elite and popular--and the dominance of the naturalistic worldview that non-mechanistic events are not possible. (Of course, a Christian would also include stubbornness/rebelliousness.)

Using the same GSS question, I created three dummy variables: 1) fables vs. literal word, 2) fables vs. inspired word, and 3) inspired word vs. literal word. The predictors are years of education and Wordsum--the proxy for IQ.

Logistic regression coefficients

Fables vs. literal word
Education .19*
IQ .23*

Fables vs. inspired word
Education .04*
IQ .05*

Inspired word vs. literal word
Education .16*
IQ .22*

In all three models, greater education predicts the more liberal position, net of the influence of IQ. The strength of the net influences of education and IQ are similar in each model. While the larger IQ coefficients makes it look like IQ is the more powerful predictor, the coefficients reflect the scale of the predictors, and education has twice as many categories as Wordsum. (The influence of education is actually probably a little stronger than IQ.)

Notice also how the coefficients in the fables/inspired word model are tiny: Smarter people and more educated people are only a little bit more likely to take the fable position. (In Half Sigma's table, very low-IQ people are more likely to think the Bible is a book of fables than average or above-average respondents. Based on his table, Half Sigma's conclusion really should be that the fable view is the view of geniuses and retards.)

The valid conclusion to draw from GSS data is that the Christian view is correct: liberal education (among other things) does increase skepticism.

Since I'm already setting off anti-Christian readers, I'll get one more item off my chest. There's a meme floating around which is Internet crankery; the idea that Jesus was not a real person. The belief is based on outdated history from about a century ago. Mainstream historians--many of them non-believers--today agree he was a real person.

Encyclopedia Britannica popped into my head as a random encyclopedia, so I looked up "Jesus Christ." It says, "Jesus, also called Jesus of Galilee or Jesus of Nazareth (born c. 6–4 bc, Bethlehem—died c. ad 30, Jerusalem)... He was born a Jew in Bethlehem before the death of Herod the Great in 4 bc, and he died while Pontius Pilate was Roman governor of Judaea (ad 28–30)."

By contrast, the same encyclopedia uses words like "flourished during early 2nd millenium"  for Abraham or "flourished 14th–13th century bc" for Moses where there might be some question about whether these were actual individuals.

The sociologist Rodney Stark claims that a religion's image of God has an impact on the conduct of adherents. People will watch their behavior more closely if they see God as a ruler rather than a friend.

GSS respondents were asked how likely it is that 1) a friend, 2) a master, or 3) a king come to mind when thinking of God. Answers ranged from very likely to not likely at all.

I calculated the contigency coefficients and p-values for the relationships between the answers to each of the three questions and whether you have ever been arrested for a crime. The sample is 388 white people. The relationship between arrest and seeing God as a friend is not statistically significant, but it is for both seeing God as a master and as a king. People with this type of image are less likely to have ever been arrested. On the other hand, the strength of the connection is weak. The coefficient (which is like a Pearson correlation) is .12 for master and .17 for king.

In sum, imagining God to be a powerful authority predicts less crime. It is possible that the trend among Christians to see God as a buddy works against improving behavior.  

This new study supports the view that people make over Jesus in their own image (e.g., blacks believing he was black; Nordics believing he looked Nordic):

In two studies, we examined whether (a) conceptions of Jesus would differ between Koreans and Americans, and whether (b) national differences in self-reported personality and well-being are mediated by the cultural norm for personality and well-being. Because there is only one Jesus, different conceptions held by Koreans and Americans are likely to reflect cultural construction processes. In Study 1, we asked Korean and American participants to engage in a free association task with Jesus as a target. Americans associated Jesus with primarily positive connotations (“awesome”) and rarely with negative connotations (“pain”), whereas Koreans associated Jesus with both positive and negative connotations. In Study 2, we asked Korean and American participants to rate Jesus and themselves using personality and well-being scales. Americans rated both Jesus and themselves as more extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, open, and happier than did Koreans. Most important, national differences in self-reported agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and happiness were partially mediated by conceptions of Jesus.

Myself, I imagine him with a hilarious, self-deprecating sense of humor and a nagging fear that he's coming down with something.

The source of antisemitism is Christianity, right? Just look at medieval Europe.

GSS respondents were asked on a scale of 0 to 100 how warmly do they they feel toward Jews. I correlated this measure with frequency of church attendance for various race-religion combinations:


Pearson correlations

White Protestants .12
White Catholics .17
White Christians .23
White Others .20
Black Protestants .14
Black Catholics -.20
Mexican Catholics .10 

Greater religiosity is associated with greater warmth. Another approach is to compare means:

Mean warmth toward Jews

White Protestants 61.9
White Catholics 65.4
White Christians 57.5
White Others 53.6
Black Protestants 60.4
Black Catholics 57.1
Whites--no religion 51.2
Blacks--no religion 46.0
Other race--no religion 50.0
Mexican Catholics 55.1

Same story. The fact is that irreligiosity predicts antisemitism. It ain't the 12th century.

FINALLY, a valid measure of prejudice. When liberal researchers want to measure the extent of prejudice in American society, they ask people if they are against affirmative action. They pose as scientists, but really they're conmen. If you want to ask somebody if they're prejudiced, ask if they're prejudiced. The researcher responds that nobody, not even a bigot, will admit it.  But we see here that 43 percent of Americans--a large number--admit to feeling at least a little prejudice toward Muslims.  

It's revealing that more Americans are prejudiced against Christians than Jews. The country is more anti-Christian than anti-Jewish.

I like the sound of this:

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.

I didn't have anything to say about Brit Hume's comments about Tiger Woods other than "awesome," but as usual, Ann Coulter has plenty to say. 

Religiosity vs. brand of Christianity: The General Social Survey asked white Christians about their brand of religion--fundamentalist, moderate, or liberal--their frequency of church attendance, and their choice of presidential candidate in 2004. Here are the results of voting for Bush regressed on the other two variables :


OLS unstandardized coefficients, N = 1,838

Liberal vs. fundamentalist -.098
Moderate vs. fundamentalist -.109
Frequency of church attendance .022
Constant 1.66

(all effects are statistically signficant at the .05 level, two-tail test)

So how are these numbers interpreted? Let's do it this way. The model can be used to predict the percentage who voted for Bush, given a set of characteristics. Here are four combinations:


Predicted percent voting for Bush

Fundamentalist, never attends 66.0
Fundemantalist, attends more than weekly 83.6
Liberal, never attends 56.3
Liberal, attends more than weekly 73.8

A fundamentalist Christian who never goes to church was less likely to vote for Bush than a liberal Christian who goes all the time.

There is much attention paid to the fundamentalist streak among Republicans, but less attention paid to the fact that many who vote Republican are moderate or liberal Christians who are serious about their religion. As is usually the case with religion, behavior is more important than status: whether you are fundamentalist are not is not as important as how devoted you are to your particular brand of Christianity.

Fundamentalists are a minority of Christian Republicans. To be precise, 62.2% of Christians who voted for Bush in 2004 were moderate or liberal believers.

A visit from an African priest: A visiting priest from sub-Saharan Africa celeberated our mass yesterday, and he really left an impression on me. I'm not very good at describing this type of thing, but he had a powerful kind of dignity. I'm not sure if it was his resonant baritone voice, his large physique and black-as-coal skin, his humble demeanor, the priestly robes, or something less tangible.

He was educated in a Catholic school, along with the 40,000 other kids taught there since it was established in the early 70s. I'm not sure what the net impact of Christianity is on Africa, but it does seem to be educating a lot of kids. It certainly seems to have helped this priest.