Is the US Really a Nation of God-Fearing Darwin-Haters?
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
There's a difference between culture and religion. Having a 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion in my passport doesn't imply that I'm religious, but it does remind me that I come from a country with a long and rich history and culture. In Northern Europe religious artifacts are primarily seen as cultural heritage, not as a way of showing your devotion to a god. I can't speak for Southern Europe, but from my limited experience of living there it doesn't seem very different.
"American church attendance and religious belief is not off the European scale if one compares it with Europe's Catholic regions. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God than the Irish and Portuguese."
The article compares all of America to a small very religious part of Europe. That would be like saying that Americans produce 20 times as many cars as Europeans because the average number of cars produced per capita in Detroit is far above the average number of cars produced per capita in Europe.
The US is the country with the smallest percentage of non-believers (3%), and as stated in the article Portugal and Italy aren't far behind(4% and 6%). The article doesn't however mention Sweden or France that are 46% and 43% non-believers.
Source: http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/8244121
Spiegel should really know better than manipulating numbers like this.
That's an interesting statement. Only in the West, and only in the last few hundred years can religion be conceived of as a discrete object, separate from culture.
Indigenous American and Hindu culture, for example, have traditionally had no such division between religion and culture. With the rise of global capitalism we may be starting to see a secular/nonsecular divide in traditionally Hindu areas (India, duh) but this is a very modern development.
edit: I should say, none of the above necessarily negates anything you said. I just think it's interesting.
edit number 2: Also, the above could also be further illuminated in a short description of the differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Worth checking out each concept on Wikipedia if y'all are interested.
Also, most of the major religions spread to different cultures a long time ago: A thousand years ago a Russian and a South Indian could have both not only been Christians, but both Eastern Orthodox, or an Indonesian and a Libyan could both be Sunni Muslims, or a Sri Lankan and Laotian could both be Theravadan Buddhists.
If people of disparate cultures could share common beliefs, sure religion and culture have always been separable. Especially pertinent to your examples are the South Indian Christians who have undoubtedly shared the culture of the Hindu majority for 2,000 years.
Furthermore, there are languages that still survive to this day that have no word for "religion" as such, something I talk elsewhere in this thread. This says to me that in some cultures religion cannot even be conceived of as separate from culture because the language does not provide the imaginative capacity to understand it that way.
So, always fluid, yes. Separable, I don't know.
Isn't that just a bias from watching too much discovery channel? We are used to seeing other cultures presented as being preoccupied with fancy rain dances, perhaps because they look good on television. But they must have a "normal day routine", too, which I would consider to be culture as well? It might be the "bag of rice in china phenomenon" - mundane daily life might not make for interesting movies, so we disproportionally often get to see special events from other countries.
However, I think you are focusing too much on religion as ritual specifically. Yes, indigenous Americans, for example, have certain rituals, rites, and special events that stand apart as specific expressions of their unique culture. If those rituals seek to connect the individuals who participate in them, and the community as a whole to an "ultimate reality" or an unseen world, we in the west call it a religious ritual. Most indigenous American people (all, as far as a I know) do not even have a word for "religion," however, so the mundane and the "fancy rain dance" are each simply forms of culture with no defining boundary.
I read the magazine since I was about 8 years old (24 years ago). They used to do top-notch invetigative journalism. Over the course of my lifetime I could wittness a big decline in quality.
"The modern American creationist, interestingly enough, no longer takes scripture as sufficient reason to believe the Biblical account of the origins of the world. The debate is, instead, conducted on the turf of science, with creationists attempting to argue the fine points of the age of the fossil record, suggesting that orthodox evolution has gaps as a seamless explanation, and otherwise indicating their acceptance that the modern world speaks the language of science."
Neo-creationists use scientific terms and talk about scientific theories, but do not advance any scientific theories or apply those terms to their own thinking. The creationist standpoint is and always has been that a literal interpretation of particular English translations of the Bible is unquestionably factually accurate, and that anything which contradicts that interpretation is to be attacked by any means available.
The only difference is that now they talk about things "irreducible complexities" (which aren't) and "the lack of transitional forms" (which isn't) as a scientific-sounding cover.
I find this very surprising!
It sounds like some interesting mental hoops were jumped through here. I wonder what exactly this is supposed to mean? cars/(person * m^2), perhaps? If so, I'm not sure how meaningful that number really is.
Yes, America is on top. Plus the article doesn't say what kind of cars the Americans drive and what kind of cars Europeans do.
http://www.unece.org/trans/doc/brochures/transport_indicator...
Der Spiegel examines the US vs Europe in a large number of dimensions and finds that the US differs far less than one might expect. For example, the white murder rate is less than that of Britain. Or that we are doing pretty well in the pollution department. Even the majority-minority tensions in the US are starting to appear in Europe because of immegration from poorer regions.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
1. Britain is a statistical outlier in terms of violent crime rates in Western Europe.
2. The underclass in Britain is much more white then the underclass in the US.
The article seems to be cherry picking to minimize differences between the US and Europe.
My observation is that most of us Europeans are pretty racist and xenophobic and big hypocrites about it too.
Now, while I will not erase the above, keep in mind that both the EU and US are huge and diverse places and generalizations are generally useless. Huge in different ways and diverse in different ways.
Integration in the US has taken huge steps in the last half-century. My ex-wife's relatives were put in US concentration camps in WWII. I remember seeing whites-only and colored signs in the south. I remember the civil rights movement of the 60's and 70's. The article speculated whether European countries are facing the same kind of transition from individual monocultures to diversity.
I certainly would welcome any insight you have.
More recently I've moved to another European country with entirely different socio-economic and religious statistics. Same old.
Much of Europe feels relatively rigid, in the sense that there are ancient attitudes, customs, social structures, and institutions that would seem out of place in the US.
You might say Europe is to the left of the US, but then we'd be talking about something else.
The origin of modern America dates back about 400 years, the origin of Europe about 2000 years. Also, the reason for many early US immigrants was to escape ancient European social structures. Europe was already crowded before America was explored: there simply was less room for outside influence from other parts of the world.
Even so, there are also quite a few attitudes, customs, social structures, and institutions in the US that would seem out of place in (most of) Europe. In fact, the sentence may even hold true for many comparisons within Europe.
I doubt, one could conclude that -- due to such differences -- one country or nation is more liberal then the other.
What matters is the nature of those differences. For example, in one place it's considered acceptable for a government to regularly collect money for a church. In the other, this would look very suspicious.
Though I must admit I have no idea how much of that applies to the US, too.
And she is the MOST-RECENT common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect to matrilineal descent. http://tr.im/kvhm