Magic Statistics

Britain has a rich cultural heritage, but fewer Britons seem to know about it.

Britons do not know the basic facts about our history, monarchy, national landmarks, or artistic heritage.

The Prince of Wales has lamented the failure to teach the classics of English literature in schools.

Now, it appears, in a country boasting concert halls in every major city and countless music festivals, most Britons are also shockingly ignorant about classical music.
. . .
The latest example of Britons' ignorance of the arts is revealed in a survey in which most admit they did not know that Sir Edward Elgar was English. Respondents wondered, instead, if he was German or Austrian.

Sir Edward appears on Bank of England currency–on the £20 note. HELLO!

The Church of England and some other Anglican churches, including the Anglican Church of Canada, remember John Wyclif, "The Morning Star of the Reformation", on 31 December, the day of his death in 1384. Todd Granger, The Confessing Reader, has posted a short biography with a collect.

In the latest issue of Touchstone Magazine, renowned public opinion pollster George H. Gallup, Jr., takes a hard look at Gregory Paul's study of religious faith and social pathologies, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies". In my opinion, it's a rout across the board. Mr Gallup and research associate D. Michael Lindsay of Princeton University challenge Mr Paul's data, his analytical methodology, and his conclusions.

Paul has made strong claims about the effect of religion upon society without examining all the other factors that might explain the phenomena he wrote about.
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[A] mountain of survey data from the Gallup and other survey organizations shows that when educational background and other variables are held constant, persons who are "highly spiritually committed" are far less likely to engage in antisocial behavior than those less committed. They have lower rates of crime, excessive alcohol use, and drug addiction than other groups.

On the other hand, the "highly spiritually committed" are more hopeful about the future and experience greater joy in life. They contribute more time helping people who are burdened with physical and emotional needs. They are less likely to be racist, and are more giving and forgiving.

At the same time, Mr Gallup acknowledges that not all Americans who profess religious faith are "highly spiritually committed". It is this gap between profession and behaviour that Mr Paul attempts to exploit.

As Paul noted, a huge majority of Americans attest to a belief in God or a higher power, but he did not ask the key question in understanding the effect of religion on American life: How deep is this belief?

Mr Gallup suggests only about 10% of American Christians are deeply commited to the faith; but these Christians are far more likely to exhibit attitudes and behaviours in keeping with the teachings of Christ.

Clearly, Mr Paul is away off the track. Equally clearly, however, Christians could be doing much more to live as salt and light in our societies.

As a final word, I am honoured that Mr Gallup and Touchstone Magazine editor David Mills quoted part of my blog post on this study.

Mere Comments has posted links to a dozen articles on C.S.Lewis that have been published in Touchstone Magazine and elsewhere. Check it out!

But Western infidels don't want to know about it:

Militant Islamism – the 21st century's most dynamic and dangerous form of totalitarianism — is attempting to appeal to 1.2 billion Muslims living in more than a hundred countries. Non-Muslims are encouraged to convert. Indeed, Osama bin Laden expects many will once it becomes clear which side in this global struggle has the stronger will to power.
. . .
Bin Laden and his ideological brethren promise that the conflict that has begun will not end until Muslims have the lands, power and status they demand and deserve. Lesser peoples are to be annihilated or subjugated. The Caliphate, the ancient empire established by Mohammed in the 7th century, is to rise again – and mosques will be built where churches and synagogues now stand. Tolerance and mutual respect among the great religions are, in their view, ludicrous concepts. More than that: They are blasphemous because they put the true religion on an equal footing with false faiths.
. . .
Postmodern Americans and Europeans may believe wars of conquest are obsolete, a discarded relic of the distant past. They may even see war itself as an aberration, an unnatural disruption of what they have convinced themselves is the "normal" state of peaceful coexistence. But our enemies view the world differently. Their perspective is of an older vintage.

via The Pearcey Report.

I’ve just started reading Knowing With the Heart: Religious Experience & Belief in God by Roy Clouser, a book recommended to me by Paul Robinson, Novice Philosopher. Roy Clouser, professor emeritus of religion and philosophy at the College of New Jersey, wants to show that Christians have solid grounds to say they know God is real. As the title suggests, the argument is based on religious experience, not on the traditional proofs for the existence of God.

On the first page of chapter 1 appears the quotation I cited in a previous post: "Proving is actually an inferior way of coming to know something, a way we resort to when we can't directly experience what we want to know". Also, very few people, if any, come to believe in God because of any arguments. (I sure didn’t, FWIW.) These observations justify an approach based on religious experience rather than rationalistic "proofs".

Near the end of the first chapter, Dr Clouser argues that beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality come before particular religions, not vice versa, as is commonly assumed. For example, one often hears this story about the origin of ancient religious beliefs: Primitive people could not understand why some occurrence (say, a crop failure) happened, and so devised pagan deities that need to be placated by some rituals and/or practices. Dr Clouser says that can’t be right:

Beliefs about what is divine are not invented out of nothing in order to explain certain things we experience but are formed in response to whatever is experienced to be divine. Missing this point is what's wrong with the popular idea that religious belief arose because primitive people were puzzled about this or that and so invented religion out of the blue to explain their puzzlements. That's not even plausible.

No doubt ancient people did invent gods, but in order to think of specific beings as bearers of divine power those people would already have had to believe in the existence of a divine reality. In other words, inventing gods depends on prior religious belief . . .

This has implications for all theoretical discussions of religion. Everyone entering into such discussions comes with assumptions and presuppositions about the nature of what is ultimately real: "The same is true about the relation of religious belief to theories. Belief in divinity is not the product of theorizing but is one of many beliefs we bring to that task."

For me, this is one of those "aha!" moments. "That’s not even plausible." Of course! But, before I could see that, someone had to point out what now seems so obvious.