“They ran this data - which covered slices of years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God, afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance - through statistical models.”  To me, this sounds like an example of slicing and dicing the data so fine that random patterns start emerging.  As in: “if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth.”  Uh, yeah, and when banana consumption increases when the first derivative of rainfall is flat, that also correlates with high GDP growth.

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One must be very careful with this type of research. What are the significant variables that have influenced this data? There are usually two to four significant variables that influence 80% of the outcome. Did they identify those variables? Also researchers tend to prove what they want to prove. How did they collect the data? There are so many holes in most research I would take it with a grain of salt. One research study especially by a husband and a wife team does not make their data and conclusions valid.

And we must ask what are the religious beliefs of the researchers? If they are atheists then their religion is Darwinism if they are religious then what religion are they? Beliefs can overwhelm the rational mind even the scientific mind. Science has become scientism and much of religion has become fundamentalism. Neither has a clue they are more alike then different.

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Harvard is well known for putting out the most steaming crap in all of ivydom, this is no exception.

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AskMyAcupuncturist, that is quite a harsh judgment to come with no explanation. While I don’t know how reliable this specific research is, it seems reasonable that different belief systems may have distinct effects on economic growth.

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