A time ago I was going though a folder wondering what to do with various odds and sods; one piece that I liked I sent off to the guardian’s Face the Faith column. It is as I wrote it here.
The Face the Faith editor, who told me when he accepted the piece that he was a Catholic, cut the end off the article, ending it on “I go on, somewhere else”; thus altering my meaning to its opposite - a bit cheap, even from one of the devout, and I e-mailed him with a tirade about intellectual dishonesty.
He didn’t reply.
Read the guardian, work for The Times, that's my limited experience.
btw, when I wrote the piece I believed that research had shown religious people, of whatever “Faith”, were happier, richer, better balanced, more content than atheists. This proved to be a myth, without evidence. It now appears that in the hub of civilisation itself, the USA (Blair, Civilisation, 2006), strong and simple religious faith and a belief in the literal and superordinate truth of the Bible correlates with - oh, the kind of things you’d expect I suppose; incest, abortion, homicide.
There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002).
So when I said soul, “fills me with a constrained energy, moral, commercial, artistic, social, that soulless I never had”, that was bollocks. We don’t only feel better off for not being religious. We are.
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