Should religion be taught in schools?

philologos wrote: »

As I've mentioned already. I think that this quote below is hugely significant:

Evidence from over 1,200 studies and 400 reviews has shown an association between faith and a number of positive health benefits, including protection from illness, coping with illness, and faster recovery from it. Of the studies reviewed in the definitive analysis, (3) 81% showed benefit and only 4% harm.

The problem here is that it does not cite a single one of this magical "1200 studies". Not a single one. If I am the only one to see an issue with that then clearly the statistical knowledge of Jakkass here is worse than I feared.

The second issue with this quote is that it simply throws out the word "benefit". WHAT benefit exactly? How is it being measures? What does it mean in this context? For example if people near death were worried about what god would do to them in the afterlife, and Christian faith helped them allay that fear, then the "benefit" here is just that faith was used to solve the problem that faith in fact caused in the first place. "Benefit" is too vague and convenient word to use and leave entirely unexplored.

One wonders given their shared penchant for talking about large amounts of studies and not referencing a single one of them... whether philologos/Jakkass had a hand in actually writing this blog post which he so happily links to.

philologos wrote: »

The article even goes through some of the difficulties and examines the methodology behind many of the studies:

2. The problem of proving causality

This is the one piece of honesty in the article and from philologos/Jakkass here. There is indeed a problem with establishing causality, and neither the article nor philologos/Jakkass solve it. Mentioning it and moving on is useful but only to a small degree.

SAYING you applied corrective measures, normalisation and other methodologies does not mean you did alas, and that is a BIG failure of the blog post itself. They CLAIM to have done so... but how.... when... where.... for what factors.... are all left to the fantasy of the reader..... one thing we should learn is if a study, or in this case a Blog Post, claims they normalised for certain factors but entirely run away from telling you which ones or how... you can instantly bin the Study/Blog.

Someone tell me, for example as this lack in the Blog Post is Glaring, how they normalised for the sense of "community" that people get when they are in a church or volunteer group. Being part of something, of a community, the mutual love and support that one garners from such a situation... all have beneficial effects on "health". So how was this normalised for in the results and the effect of "Faith" (beneficial or otherwise) seperated from the effect of "community" in order to show it WAS faith having any beneficial effects at all???

Something tells me an answer from Jakkass/philologos on that will not be forthcoming today, or ever.

philologos wrote: »

That's why I'm seriously wondering if people actually read it or if they fobbed it off immediately.

.... which is why IM seriously wondering if people actually read it or do they selectively quote the parts that sound good to them as lay men to the world of statistics... and pretend that these blog posts are actual studies when they are anything but.

And given the validity of my concerns I'm seriously wondering if people actually read them or if they fobbed them off immediately.

philologos wrote: »

It's a good presentation of the current research out there and it looks at it in quite a thorough manner. For example it admits that prayer studies are inconclusive at present:

I would like to transcribe quickly (apologies for slight changes or spelling) the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson to deal with this joke of a statement. The article was neither thorough nor systematic. Suggesting that the research on Prayer is at some kind of “Jurys out” point right now is just a joke.

Here are the words that say it better than me. The words are in response to being asked if Cell Phone Use causes damage due to radioactivity but can be equally applied to the question of whether Prayer has any actual effect:

There is a very important rule of science. You can only measure within the certainties of your measurement device. Here is what happens: If you are trying to measure a phenomenon that does not exist the variations in your measurement will occasionally give you a positive signal. If your idea is that A causes B a paper gets written about that result and people get concerned. These are the phenomenon of a no result.

However when you actually have A causing B the signal is huge and it is repeatable in time and in place.

There simply is no significant signal coming from studies that Prayer has any effect at all. The result is just not there in the papers. The use of that lack of result to suggest the Jury is somehow still out on the issue is just a canard and one that people should be aware of.

These studies are not "inconclusive" as the user above wants to paint them. The studies simply have not shown a result and so the idea that prayer has any effect can be disregarded as unsubstantiated.

The only positive signal I am aware of to come out of studies of prayer is that telling people you are praying for them is actually harmful to the psychological well being of the person concerned.

An interesting comparison that. It is indeed no wonder that ours schools are the battle grounds of bad ideas that people have no evidence for. Sell your lies into the minds of children early and they are harder to remove later on. No wonder the religious prey on them so fervently. No wonder users like philologos are willing to twist, lie and trick in order to subject Children to these ideas.... safe in the knowledge that later in life it will not matter that it was all lies, the idea will for a lot of people stick anyway.

Totally agreed. The subject of religion itself should be taught, not as something that is true, but as a social and historical phenomena around the world.

Parts of it could indeed be integrated into other classes better. For example the fact we study things like Shakespeare and Milton in English class yet we do not study the Bible is... forgive the pun.... just a sin given how heavily influenced they were by it.

Teaching things like the idea there actually is a god however, that is just plain wrong and in many ways just plain creepy.