I obviously think science is a wonderful thing. However, I also think that common sense can be often used rather then spending thousands or millions to come to a conclusion.

I used to work for a company that published magazines for the cable television industry. I read an article about one Pay TV company spending several million to run a study of peoples tv habits. The main conclusion was that the one nite you could count on people having steady habits was Sunday nite. So the company made a big deal that they were going to start showing premieres of new movies on Sunday.

I could have told them that for a lot less then several million. I was far more likely to be invited to a party that revolved around a tv program on Sunday than any other night. Why, because since its the weekend the host/hostess would have Sunday day to prepare. And the party would be a nice relaxing event to prepare for the work week.

Much the same in the religion study. Common sense tells me, and I've witnessed it first hand, that if you try to force a group of people to adhere to a certain behavior, a certain percentage will rebel and do the opposite of the requested behavior.

Anti-drug messages will spur a certain percentage to want to experiment and find out what the big deal is. Similarly, all the abstain from sex messages will spur a certain percentage of teenagers to want to experiment more.

>Dragan,
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>Have you read the source article? It is essentially about societal dysfunction in the USA correlated with religiosity, with the USA having the greatest wealth, greatest religious belief according to surveys, and greatest dysfunction indices in the First world. The comparison is with more secular places such as Scandinavia, France and Japan.
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>3rd World/Eastern Bloc countries are not included in the comparisons because of lack of survey evidence. Which is unfortunate, since we can both think of secular states with extremely high societal dysfunction.
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>The author's conclusion is that more research is needed. I'd agree with that- especially since I can think of several other possible correlations, such as size of military which has an extremely strong correlation with societal dysfunction. Obviously that doesn't appear in a Journal entitled "Journal of Religion and Society". ;-) If we look for a causative link, lets not forget the "Chicken and Egg" scenario- is US religious fervor a response to societal dysfunction, or vice versa?