Brooks defines this as those who attend religious services at least once a week, which works out to around 30% of the population. Elsewhere it's said that Christian charities tend to be more wide-ranging in their scope, because Christian charities generally don't restrict their work toward only Christians, and Christian givers don't restrict their giving toward only Christian charities (giving to secular charities along with religious ones). In constrast, Muslim, and to a lesser extent Jewish charities tend to be narrowly focused on Muslims and Jews respectively.
This merely proves my point that you are not offering evidence that supports your interpretation by citing this study since he bothered to include Muslim and Jewish groups in the total. The thesis that Christian belief makes better people cannot be supported with evidence so tainted.
That makes no sense at all. Let me quote from the book:
Imagine two women who are both forty-five years old, white, married, have an annual household income of $50,000, and attended about a year of college. The only difference between them is that one goes to church every week, but the other never does. The churchgoing woman will be 21 percentage points more likely to make a charitable gift of money during the year than the nonchurchgoer, and will also be 26 points more likely to volunteer. Furthermore, she will tend to give $1,383 more per year to charity, and to volunteer on 6.4 more occasions.
Pretty self-explanatory. If you are a Christian who regularly attends church, you are part of this statistical group.
Battuta's and my own point is that you are posisting that the Second Coming will occur only when the world has been divided into the believing good and the unbelieving evil. This is first-order crazy because such a thing cannot occur; belief in Jesus or even the Abrahamic god in general is not a precondition to being a good person. The conditions you state for the Second Coming are impossible, thus it will play out differently in such a way as to prove God is a prick by condemning based solely on belief or lack thereof with no regard to any other factors.
You are conflating two independent points here. As for "the Second Coming will occur only when the world has been divided into the believing good and the unbelieving evil", Revelation states that the circumstances immediately before the Second Coming are the Antichrist having forced the entire world to either worship him or be killed. That's a pretty binary situation.
As for "belief in Jesus or even the Abrahamic god in general is not a precondition to being a good person", I never said it was. I said that a Christian will bear fruit (i.e. actively be a good person) by virtue of his Christianity. I also said that being a good person is indicative of having the kind of heart that the Christian God accepts. But being good in general does not necessarily mean you are a Christian (or even religious), though they are strongly correlated.
Goob's argument is basically the circular 'good people will become Christian, and Christian people are good'.
See response to NGTM-1R above.
And the argument that Islam spread by conquest and Christianity by trade is absurd - Islam was known as 'the merchant's religion' for a reason, and when Islam came to power there was a golden age of scientific and commercial development (taken versus Europe's Dark Ages.)
Quite false. Compare the first 300 years of Christianity (when Christians were fleeing Roman persecution) with even the first 30 years of Islam. The Muslims conquered, in quick succession, Damascus in 635, al-Basrah and Antioch in 636, Jerusalem in 638, Alexandria in 642, Cilicia in 650. The reason there was a "golden age" is because they were plundering their neighbors.
And I wish to amend my earlier statement that the Crusades were primarily about territorial expansion. They started off first of all as a
defensive war. The Muslims had conquered nearly all of Spain by 715, held Sicily from 827 through 1091, and captured Manzikert in 1071. It was in response to this that the First Crusade was called in 1095 -- to recapture Christian lands that had been lost to Islamic expansion over nearly 500 years.
Let's not take charitable giving as a metric. Let's take, I dunno, tolerance and inclusiveness of homosexuals. Or compassion for the dying through euthanasia. Or, I dunno, hmm, how about prevention of AIDS in the third world by promoting contraception through condoms. Let's see... what about... hmm, I know, what about the compassion for the millions of people suffering huntingtons and parkinsons that might be cured through stem cell research. Let's see how Christians stack up against the non religious in those areas of human compassion.
You do realize that you're cherry-picking a lot of core theological issues, right? You may as well choose the metric of worshipping Zeus. (Also, you should note that most Christian opposition to stem cell research is specifically to
embryonic stem cell research.)
The study's bull**** anyway. Constant reminders to be generous could probably produce the same effect on secular individuals. Or, alternatively, churchgoing may be correlated with wealth and leisure (or may not - but it's a hypothesis) and therefore indirectly with more giving. The confounds are infinite.
The decision to post that study clearly involved very little critical or scientific thought. Which points out some of the dangers of faith, I suppose.
How does a
scientific study, complete with an appendix full of statistical data, involve very little scientific thought? Be careful that you're not committing the error of
the backfire phenomenon.
the Christian will bear Christian fruit.
No true Scotsman.
On the contrary, Christian fruit is an essential mark of a Christian life. It's far more consequential than eating porridge with or without sugar.
Ninety-one percent of regular church attendees give to charity each year, compared with 66 percent of those who said they do not have a religion. The gap adds up—the faithful give four times more money per year than their secular counterparts. While most of that money is given to churches, religious people also give more to secular charities, such as the Red Cross or their alma mater.
Makes the claims less meaningful. Show us the data after you eliminate the churches; supporting one's preacher is not morally equivalent to feeding the hungry.
Then let's take strictly secular charity. Again from the book:
Although the charity gap between [religious people and secularists] was not as wide in secular giving as it was for all types of giving, religious people were still 10 points more likely than secularists to give money to nonreligious charities such as the United Way (71 to 61 percent) and 21 points more likely to volunteer for completely secular causes such as the local PTA (60 to 39 percent). In addition, the value of the average religious household's donation to nonreligious charities was 14 percent higher than the average secular household's.
This same correlation extends to donating blood, giving money to a homeless person, and returning extra change accidentally given them by a cashier.
You need to go into much more detail to show that religion is actually the cause for higher charity.
I've gone into quite a bit of detail already, especially with this last post. If you're really interested in the statistics, you should probably review them yourself.
I was able to get the book on Kindle for $10. But I'll close with another quote:
My explanations are based entirely based on data. They are the fruit of years of analysis on the best national and international datasets available on charity, lots of computational horsepower, and the past work of dozens of scholars who have looked at various bits and pieces of the giving puzzle. ... the findings of this book -- many of which may appear conservative and support a religious, hardworking, family-oriented lifestyle -- are faithful to the best available evidence, and contrary [emphasis in the original] to my political and cultural roots. Indeed, the irresistible pull of empirical evidence in this book is what changed the way I see the world.
