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Originally Posted by polak
I'm not going to go do this research right now but I think it'd be pretty easy to plot out an exponential decrease in overall quality of life in areas with a larger amount of religious people.
Think about it. Religions tend to believe that many things are "wrong" and this tends to take away rights and freedoms from huge swaths of the population. The closer you get to that, understandably, the lower the general quality of life will be (Islamic states for instance).
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This was the point in my first post here. Yes, the data is there, and it seems to suggest a relationship between religion and quality of life, but I will repeat: there are
numerous other contributing factors that need to be considered. Furthermore, it cuts both ways: The immense wealth and liberty that we enjoy in the Western World is very much indebted to the religiously fuelled idealism and ambition that accompanied the Protestant Reformation. Something else that significant complicates your hypothesis is that religions are diverse, and that not all kinds of religion will produce identical societal effects.
Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
Actually the more I think about it, the more I believe there is a very large and strong link between religious states and quality of life. Maybe it's the lower quality of life (and the lack of access to information that comes with that) that leads to religious following though.
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This is true, and this also is part of what I was getting at earlier. There are stronger forces at work than religion in many cases. I think most pertinently, liberty, free enterprise, hedonism, and individualism have had a significantly greater impact on quality of life than the decline of religion.