Time Immortal

Dr. Helen links to, and reviews in brief, a very interesting-sounding book:

I spent part of the day reading Vox Day’s new book, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. You might know Vox Day from his blog and interesting take on feminist issues — he always has something provocative to add to that particular conversation and his book proves to be just as stimulating in regards to religion and faith. The Irrational Atheistis described as follows (from the inside cover):

The Irrational Atheist is not a theological work nor is it a conventional religious defense of faith. It contains no arguments for the existence of God and the supernatural, nor is it concerned with evolution, creationism, the age of Earth, or intelligent design. This book contains no arguments from Scripture. In attacking the arguments, assertions, and conclusions of the New Atheists, Vox Day’s only weapons are the secular tools of reason, logic and historically documented, independently verifiable fact. The Irrational Atheist is not a book about God, but about those who seek to replace Him….

Day takes on the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens and seeks to demonstrate that they and other “New Atheists” are no champions of reason.

Sounds like I might just have to pick this book up. In particular, I’m left tantalized by the small sample Dr. Helen provides of Vox Day’s analysis:

For example, Day discusses one argument made by Harris where Harris questions the correlation between Christian conservatism and social health:

If there was a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and social health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the 25 cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” [Democrat] states and 38% are in “red” [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the US are in the pious state of Texas.

Interestingly, though, Day found that “red-state” crime is primarily committed by “blue counties” within those states and has a nice chart to show the stats on this. It seems that Harris was looking at states such as Texas that had more crime and called the states “red” but conveniently omitted the part where the counties where the crimes were committed tended to be “blue.”

Other myth busters include the notion that religion causes the majority of war as some atheists profess, Day provides evidence to the contrary–he found that more than 93% of all the wars in human history had no relation to Religion. In the twentieth century, in fact, he states that atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined.

I admit I’ve never been particularly troubled by the atheistic assertion that the falsity of religion can be demonstrated in part by the way that more secular nations seem to have lower crime rates than more religious nations do. As has been articulated many times (most recently, and eloquently, by Mark Shea), the validity of the teachings of the Church are in no way dependent on the actions of members of the Church. But neither have I had the time to really delve into the finer points of the statement, and it’s nice to see that Day has taken the time.

In the end, the numbers don’t really surprise all that much, do they? It turns out that the religious are, in fact, less to blame.

And in a more general sense, the notion that the crime rate is lower in more ardently secular nations does necessarily imply that the people of those nations are more moral than in nations where religion still has some value, and that is the more important distinction. That is to say: the murder rates in Sweden and Norway might be lower than in the U.S. or the Phillipenes, but where do the abortion rates sit? The rates of property crime might also be lower, but what about the rates of marital infidelity and/or pre-marital sex and serial monogamy?

In the end, legality is a less important metric than morality, because the laws of most free nations are designed (in theory) to enforce a minimum standard…but of course, there is more to being a moral person than just following the laws of the land to the letter, because laws are a human construct and subject to change at the will of humanity. Morality is external to human willfulness and weakness. How, I wonder, do all these secular nations measure up by that standard?