sprucegoose: Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

About Me

Location: MInneapolis, Minnesota, United States

I am now a simple Grandpa who's life is made richer as each grandchild is born. My wife and I have raised five children and the 30 year love labor of raising them has begun to yield sweet fruit..... And then there are fruits of 30 years in ministry ... I am a satisfied old man full of the joy of the Lord.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

Here is a disturbing post. This social scientist is either a spin master or else he started with bad assumptions and came to a bad conclusion, but the "facts" speak darkly any way you look at it.
I think it is because of the "curse of the law." People in the US are busy either fighting or serving the law instead of resting in God's grace and allowing His Holy Spirit to sanctify them.
That is, if we can trust this guys data.

You can look at the post here.

2 Comments:

Lyn said...: This sociologist's data is way off...laughable! Read Neil's post at Digitus, Finger & Co regarding this "study" -
http://www.neiluchitel.com/?p=431

Plus, an easy refutation is this simple illustration. If you’re walking down a dark alley and a group of young people approached you, would you feel better knowing they were just coming out of a bible study or out of a bar?
Lyn at Thought Renewal; 3:08 PM, September 28, 2005
Anonymous said...: The actual journal article in question even says "This is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health" and that "it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions."

Paul did not use any of the accepted methods of statistical analysis and instead only looked at correlation. He completely ignored any possible confounding factors (unmeasured factors that may be causing the results he sees, such as average distance to a hospital).

The paper also gives neither correlations nor p-values (measure of how significant the value is). He only states if the correlation is positive or negative. The graphs are misleading with their scaling, which make the trends seem more significant than they are.

I teach statistics, and if one of my students turned in that article as their course project, I would tell them that it is a nice research paper but a poor statistical study.; 7:35 PM, September 29, 2005