(January 26, 2015 at 6:08 am)Creed of Heresy Wrote: So I was reading "Non-believer Nation" and the writer brought up a number of very good points about the correlation in national population percentages between secularity and religiosity in regards to crime. I knew about the studies in the US, but apparently it's not just in the US; the higher the ratios of secular individuals to religious individuals, the lower the rate of violent crimes, particularly murder and sexual assault.
This is a topic trail that we've walked many times before, or at least most of us have, but I'm interested in hearing what our resident theists have to say on the matter. I find myself wishing there were more around here for these kinds of conversations, believe it or not, largely because I'm interested in hearing the explanations of religious people as to how they feel about this. I'm not asking for refutations of the statistics; they exist, and the closest thing I can call absolute truth is that of numbers, and given how the statistical trends are always in favor of this outcome, my mind is all but concluded in the regards of whether or not this is a fact. I just wanna know what theists think about this.
If one says that "good wholesome Christian values" are a good strong moral backing, how does one explain how the less a national population adheres to those values, the lower the crime rates are?
If it went the other way around, that the more secularization of a population, the more violent the society, I personally would find myself hard-pressed to explain it other than to say "religion must provide peace of mind and culture," but such is not the case.
Dear Creed of Heresy
the factor I have found in people's ability to break the patterns of abuse, crime, violence and other sickness is
forgiveness that promotes natural healing of mind body and relationships.
I have found this forgiveness and recovery counseling based on it
in both secular forms and religious forms.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both:
the secular forms can reach more people, both religious and nonreligious,
who still need to identify which problems in their minds are causing problems
to repeat and preventing steps to resolve them.
the religious forms, particularly Christian healing prayer and deliverance,
can heal very deep extreme conditions that secular methods cannot affect.
Scott Peck used deliverance to treat otherwise incureable patients with such
extreme schizophrenic conditions that they refused to follow therapy and treatment,
until after the deliverance process was used to get rid of their demonic obsessions.
I would recommend studying both the religious and secular forms of therapy,
and using both to treat drug and criminal addictions,
before judging which methods work better in which cases.
I would guess the secular methods work more broadly to cover general issues
of the larger population; but the religious methods may be the only methods
that work on extreme addictions and abuse cases where secular means fail
because they do not address the deeper spiritual levels keeping people sick.
