Name's Jason. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes, and debating on-line and off. Just read my stuff, you'll get the picture.
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After a ridiculous comment over at Le Café Witteveen, it occurred to me that a graph might help explain why the fundie-who-must-not-be-named is just pulling this crap out of his ass, as usual. I know he said Christianity specifically, but honestly, any religion is as good as any other in my books and the studies I found didn’t differentiate.
I pulled the numbers into a spreadsheet from this survey on religion for various criteria to compare against a number of different metrics for societal well-being, specifically life expectancy, self-reported happiness rank, GDP purchasing power parity, and income equality (richest 10% vs poorest 10% ratio). There were only so many countries that had numbers for all the variables, so I only included those that had numbers for all of them.
The life expectancy is in straight age for both sexes, and the metric I chose for religiosity was what percentage of the surveyed population reported that they prayed “several times a day”. In order to get the happiness and GDP numbers to fall into a 0-100, I took the happiness ranking (-5 to +5) value and I added 5, then multiplied by 10. This gives you a sort of subjective idea as to how happy the countries are, with concrete numbers that are based on the real numbers, and that scale to 100 properly. For GDP, I merely divided by 1000.
Science. It can be done by a guy and Wikipedia in an hour while watching Zombieland.
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Totally off topic, but I hope that you and Jodi have a great wedding!
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Thanks Paul. I hope so too!
We’ll be posting videos shortly after the wedding so you’ll get to see how great (or awful) it turns out to be. Just not in realtime. Wish I could have done some kind of live feed.
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Zombieland rocked, by the way.
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I would think ‘prays several times a day’ would bias towards Muslim nations, since multiple (five?) prayers per day is one of the five pillars. I think you can be a Christian and a pretty solid ’1′ on the Dawkins scale and only pray once per day, or even once per week.
I know “Do you know God exists” isn’t data we have, but isn’t there some kind of “attends regular church service” or something?
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Hey where’s the wonderfully long lived happy healthy countries like The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark on there ?? I suppose I should also request the country where your and my Queen lives as well
And as for he-who-is-retardingly-ridiculously-deluded is seriously going even more la-la-land this decennium on Jeremy’s blog !!
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