I found the following at World versus Christians, Post 41:

Did you know that the Thomas Howells, Study of students showed religiously conservative students "are, in general, relatively inferior in intellectual ability." Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

http://new.woxy.com/boards/archive/index.php/t-31351.html<o:p></o:p>

By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

Here is my response to it:

I think I know why. Strict religion has so many rules to keep its people "pure." To convince people to keep the rules, the churches tell them that "the world" does all the things these rules forbid. Christians should be better than "the world." So Christians think it makes them better people if they keep the rules. But they want to rebel once in a while because they are human. So they experiment with doing some of these terrible things that the rules forbid. The problem is that the preachers never look at "the world" to see if the people "out there" really do all these things. They just look at Paul's lists of sins in the New Testament. Paul says they do it, it's in the Bible, the Bible is inerrent, so it must be true. For those of us who actually look at what people do in real life (as opposed to what some ancient author says) we realize that only a tiny percent of society lives like that. Most people want to feel okay about themselves so they just don't do those horrible things. There are no rules to keep them from doing it but they just know it's not decent. Conclusion: It's one of two options:

1. only people who are inclined to doing bad things convert to religion, OR
2. too many rules just ask for trouble