Does Religion Cause Immorality? - ExChristian.Net - News and ...

In all the confusion over what Paul said or didn’t say, his real contention is often missed. He explained that his research wasn’t really about the United States; it was about the other well-off Western democracies where religious belief is comparatively low. He wanted to examine the idea that a “secularized” society would do worse than a faithful society, which he called “a common theme of many religious people — not all of them, but many.”

“What my study shows is that’s simply not true,” Paul said in an interview.

“In Western society, there are many, many secularized nations that are performing quite well socially. So that’s the main conclusion,” he said. “What I’ve done is I’ve falsified what I call the creationist social hypothesis, and I’ve done that forever. You can never make the claim again that it’s impossible to have a society that’s non-religious that does well.”

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