Is religion mostly bad for us? How does belief in the rightness of one’s views get in the way of the tolerance that greases democracy’s operation? How does faith in the next world’s heaven block the slogging hard work needed to make life better in this world?
Politics is usually about the economy; how to make life better through jobs and growth. Governments unable to deliver growth, however, can employ non-economic, or culturally-based, objectives to obscure lack of job creation. The Middle East in particular seems a region beset by governments that would rather talk Islam and its Zionist and anti-Islamic enemies than provide its population economic prosperity.
Is the picture really so simple? Austin Dacey, who is writing a book on the virtues of secularism, sarcastically denigrated Europe in Thursday’s New York Times to make the point that the secular “old world” has given its people a great life. Dacey wrote, “True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime.”
Too bad Dacey can’t talk about “post-Christian” Europe’s economic growth or job creation, since the EC trails the rest of the developed world, including a less “post-Christian” U.S., in both respects.
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