On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
I understood you as "entertaining the possibility" of your original quote. I don't think that you can take such a statement in terms of "big if true" without looking at a larger context.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
I don't think there's a strong arrow of causation either way. The US is very religious (for a developed nation) for it's historical/social and economic reasons and Europe less-so similarly. The one thing I'd say is that, statistically, there's little plausible evidence that "turning to religion" helps the US' problems.
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
It seems half this thread has been riding the strawman of "secular philosophers". I could mention a variety of secular sources that make an effort to provide hope or reconciliation or whatever from the Sartre and Camus to the latest self-help, non-religious stuff claims to provide a lot.
But the real way these argument are faulty is that they assume religious approaches are somehow the tried and true approach for dealing with tragedy and that assumption is just unjustified. If we throw the gates open to discussion of how to deal with all of life's difficulties it's a big topic and one I'm going to claim I have all the answers to. But I don't want let the assumption "religious is well known for dealing well this stuff" just slip in. That's not my experience. I've seen religious people spend a lot of time blaming the people who've experienced these tragedies. I've seen people turn away from religion and not find it useful and I've with a variety of personal tragedies without religion and done just fine. That's anecdotal but it's mostly refusing to accept your presupposition.
Religion may be the opium of the masses but opium isn't usually isn't a cure for what ails it's average user.
To be honest, I've never heard of the midwest referred to anything other than boring, which seems like it would be a strong contradiction to "horrific social problems"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
The top Midwest state is South Dakota, in 12th place.
There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as equivalent to the "vaccines are made of mercury, cause autism, the lord is my vaccine,etc" single digit iq cretins.
It got politicized because apparently both parties decided it was OK to fuck with America's pandemic response, because it justifies expansion of power and control. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer).
Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and lots of 5g is a world domination conspiracy.
I don't deny there may be some people only there about the mandate. But I've found that , that sort of person seems to be rare
Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.
I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.