Assuming there is direct causation here rather than simple correlation I'll take it. The long term harms of religion far outweigh these items. You don't have to look much further than the death toll in the middle east for an example.

One of the services a church provides is a community. For some religions it’s wielded as a weapon though. Leave, and lose everything. Take a peek at /r/exmormon for a bunch of examples.

What people need is a secular community to replace it, and not all find it. Some of the things listed above are exacerbated by feelings of isolation or lack of purpose.

A lie is best concealed between two truths. Churches know how to organize people. It’s a rare set of people management skills that has nothing specific to do with the Divine. They’ve just had more opportunity to hone those skills.

But as humans we often trust people who show expertise in multiple areas to be telling us the truth about other things as well. There are plenty of good things that happen at churches, but they don’t have to happen at a church. And the more they happen in the secular world, the more people figure out they can pick and chose things that make them feel like decent human beings without signing up for the others. That’s either a terrifying or comforting statement, depending on which way you are coming from.

To take your point further, gangs also provide community, in a very negative way to the rest of society.

So do volunteer organizations and other secular institutions and groups like book clubs, fitness groups, tabletop game players, Pokemon Go players, etc.

Back to my own speculation, I'd surmise that a lot of people who go to church may go for the community or personal connections, and may not even believe in the dogma. Many times I've been to church enough times to have listened to frequent sermons about maintaining faith, and those sermons always puzzle me - why do these churchgoers have such difficulty maintaining faith to the point where the preacher has to bring it up regularly?

I absolutely agree. America really needs some mandatory citizen participation program. Force everyone to work 5 hours a month towards some project while increasing social cohesion.

It doesn’t need to be mandatory if someone makes them fashionable. We have plenty of other colors besides Pink and (RED), for instance.

Christianity had their issue and politicized Christianity had done enormous damage to our society trough bigotry, segregation and straight up wars, but it got better in the recent decades and meanwhile it's by no means perfect we're throwing away the only western moral framework with no replacement in sight. this will do a number on society coesion and it's already visibile in certain aspects.

You’re being unfair to gscott. He didn’t make a causation claim.

It's implied considering how irrelevant those statistics are to this conversation.

I think it’s ok to bring up anecdotes as long as you don’t outright say they’re causal.

Just a heavy implication.

Besides the other replies to you discussing correlation not being causation - is the purpose of your comment to disseminate truth or convince others to join a religion? And why don't you link to us religious missions of non-Christian religions like Islam or Judaism?

Let's (easily) debunk each of your sources to demonstrate their complete irrelevance to this topic:

- The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.

- The Violent Crime article you've cited only talks about the past two consecutive years, not the decade-long time period cited by the religious affiliation trends in this article.

- Homeless populations probably aren't sampled in this phone survey, so the homelessness rate can't be correlated with the information given here.

Your weak correlation to religion is entirely debunked by choosing just about any Western/Northern European country, or much of Asia like China, South Korea, and Japan, and noticing that their religious affiliation numbers are far lower than the US has ever been, along with their violent crime rate.

What do Christian churches do? They certainly don't pay property taxes, so they don't fund public schools, police, or mental health services, like a normal business or resident would if they occupied the property.

> The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.

Homicides are indeed down, and that includes firearm homicides as well. When people mention any recent rise in firearm deaths, what they are are really saying is that firearm suicides are on the rise.

As for prevalence, it's not as uneven as you would think.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/aug/05...

>In one study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the United States actually ranked 66th among other world nations when it came to the frequency mass public shootings per capita.

>And when just comparing European countries with the United States and Canada, the U.S. ranked 12th in a comparative study between 2009-2015.

https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...

In general, replace all of the social and infrastructure with themselves at the center and then there's nothing to replace when the churches fail to serve the people - so people leave.

(I've never been a member of any - I just study - as a hobby - "conversion era" in Europe. Be aware that some of what the church replaced was toxic, and some was not. It's an interesting set of eras to study....)

The churches have failed though, largely. And finding out why can be informative. (this is not a religious failure, this is a social one. Don't blame peoples' beliefs for this, that's not the right target).

correlation != causation

Europe has been though a similar de-religion phase without many of the problems you stated.

In addition to what others have said about correlation vs causation, this "less religious societies have more violence and social problems" view doesn't stand up to the statistics https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/our-humanity-natural...

This is also correlated with the rise of a new and powerful religion, informally called progressism.

If you don't think it's a religion, try to speak publicly against it, and observe the kind of protest it's going to evoke. Most of it will not be a calm rational discussion, or even a light-hearted dismissal. For many, you would appear attacking the holy.

The experiment above is dangerous; I'd suggest studying preivous experimental data first.

If we are indulging in causation and correlation mixup, have you noticed that some of the most ruthless public service cutting politicians and outsourcing CEOs are devout church going folks ? You have cut social services and mental support services , branded those who need such services as freeloaders and you are blaming secularism.

This is exactly the main issue I see right now, politicians who use Christianity as a banner to do less for people. Which is very confusing to me but somehow they get away with it. This is turning people away from Christianity before they can find out that its purpose is to serve people especially the mentally ill, homeless, poor, etc.

Crime rate is on global decline for several decades (even article you linked mentions that)

Yeah, it’s almost as if a Christian-backed conservative political coalition dismantled the welfare state and stopped new services from being put in place or something...

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how provocative another comment is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Arguably the second blow does more damage to the container.

As a moderator, is there a reason you're dinging the person making the second blow, but not the first?

dang was right to ding me. I was bullied as a kid by right-wing Christians espousing these kinds of talking points and projected that lingering resentment into this conversation. Apologies.

Thank you for reacting so kindly.

A few reasons I suppose: the first comment was already dinged by the community; the second comment upped the ante considerably; and I was insufficiently aware of how inflammatory the topic is. By which I mean: I was well aware of how inflammatory the topic is, and even that was not enough. So I learned something in this thread.

Also joined with a rise in support for LGBTQ rights. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

I think all of those things are clearly caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2, and the correlated reduction in maritime piracy.

Or, mayhaps, there are more mundane, economic explanations for them...

You deserve much more credit for this comment than you will get. Correlation does not equal causation!

I agree. I think it matches the absurdity of the original comment perfectly.

Would you agree that there's a real relation there, though? That piracy was affected by industrialization and militarization as was CO2 output?

«This parodies the suggestion from some religious groups that the high numbers of disasters, famines, and wars in the world is due to the lack of respect and worship toward their deity.»

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirat...