Can the Alternet Atheists Read? Does Alternet Care?

I don't have the time to go into depth, but one of Alternet's atheists, CJ Werleman has yet another distortion of a Pew study up today.   He begins very badly by using the widely discredited claims by Steve Pinker that the modern world is becoming decreasingly violent.  That alone would discredit the author of an article, for me. The article goes on to claim the Pew study supports the neo-atheist line on religion.

Religiosity, however, continues to play its part in promoting in-group out-group thinking, which casts the difference between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, observes, “Faith inspires violence in two ways. First, people often kill other human beings because they believe the creator of the universe wants them to do it…Second, far greater numbers of people fall into conflict with one another because they define their moral community on the basis of their religious affiliation: Muslims side with Muslims, Protestants with Protestants, Catholics with Catholics.”

That would be Sam Harris, the advocate for the illegal invasion of Iraq, one of the most violent of acts in the new millennium, which unleashed enormous sectarian violence by overturning the secular dictator, who was far from violence free.  Oh, and the same Sam Harris who advocated  both that it might be justified to kill people for what they think and that it might be a good idea to nuke tens of millions of Muslims in a single day as a preemptive strike against the possibility of them getting the bomb.*

Anyway, as always seems to be the case with the Alternet atheists, Werleman doesn't seem to have read what the Pew survey was about, which largely dealt with majority religious governments making laws and policies that suppressed the rights of minority religious groups.  And if you counted atheism as a religion, in the case of North Korea, which they admit is responsible for some of the most severe oppression, it has to rank right up there in violence.

Finally, it is very likely that more restrictions exist than are reported by the 18 primary sources. But taken together, the sources are sufficiently comprehensive to provide a good estimate of the levels of restrictions in almost all countries. The one major exception is North Korea. The sources clearly indicate that North Korea’s government is among the most repressive in the world with respect to religion as well as other civil and political liberties. (The U.S. State Department’s 2012 Report on International Religious Freedom, for example, says that “Genuine freedom of religion does not exist” in North Korea.) But because North Korean society is effectively closed to outsiders and independent observers lack regular access to the country, the sources were unable to provide the kind of specific, timely information that Pew Research categorized and counted (“coded,” in social science parlance) for this quantitative study. Therefore, the report does not include scores for North Korea.

Another officially atheist country, China, was included and the news there wasn't great.  It figured in a list of most populous countries where they found increased strife.

Among the 25 most populous countries, Turkey was the only one in which the level of government restrictions increased by one full point or more, and Japan and Nigeria were the only two in which the level of government restrictions decreased by one point or more. The level of religious hostilities increased by one point or more in nine countries: Mexico, Turkey, China, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, France, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Italy. Ethiopia was the only country among the 25 most populous where the level of religious hostilities decreased by one or more points during the same time period. **

You might want to read the Pew report and compare it to Werleman's article and see that the Alternet atheist has entirely misrepresented what the study was supposed to be about and its claims.

Having, in my frequent blog brawls on these issues, had the example of certain alleged atheist paradises held up for comparison to my own, allegedly benighted and God-ridden country, especially by Brit-atheists, I was amused to read Appendix 3.   Appendix 3 gives Pews "Social Hostilities Index".

The following table shows all 198 countries and territories in descending order of their scores on the Pew Research Center’s index of social hostilities involving religion as of the end of 2012.

The "Very High" index is no surprise, all of the countries on it are in the news for stories featuring violent struggles, sometimes excused on the basis of religion.

The United States, often presented by atheists as a slough of religious intolerance and bigotry comes in quite low, way way down on the "Moderate" column, two places lower in strife than Denmark, which has been cited to me as an atheist paradise.   At the same time the two countries most often named as ideal atheist societies to me in online brawls,  The UK and Sweden, both come in on the list of "High" religious strife.  The UK comes in between Georgia and Nepal, Sweden between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ukraine.  I've got to say that the evidence that they present would seem to show that atheists aren't too good at reading these kinds of reports.

While I find the Pew methodology rather bizarre and I am entirely skeptical of this kind of analysis, doubting it means anything, I am not the one who cited it, along with Pinker and Harris to come up with a post today.  I can only claim to have read what the Alternet hack has only pretended to.

*  I'd still think it would be a far better idea to demand that the governments in those places kill all of the physicists and chemists who might be in the position to make and sustain bombs.  It would certainly avoid murdering tens of millions of entirely innocent people.

** You might want to contrast this list to see how weird the citation of this Pew study as a measure of societal violence is.

Brazil, the Philippines, Japan, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have the least restrictions and hostilities. 

That would be The Democratic Republic of the Congo,  of which Human Rights Watch says:

Widespread human rights abuses by all parties to the conflict in eastern Congo continued in 2013, despite renewed regional and international initiatives to end the violence. The M23 rebel group, which has received significant military support from Rwanda since its inception in April 2012, has committed serious abuses in Rutshuru and Nyiragongo territories, including summary executions, rapes, and forced recruitment of children. Other parts of eastern Congo have seen a rise in inter-ethnic violence as the Congolese government and army, which were focused on trying to defeat the M23, left a security vacuum that other abusive militia groups sought to fill. These groups, including the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the Raia Mutomboki, and Nyatura, have killed hundreds of civilians and burned scores of villages since early 2012. In Katanga province, in southeastern Congo, Mai Mai fighters have carried out brutal attacks, killing, raping, and mutilating dozens of civilians. The Congolese army has also been responsible for killings, rapes and ill-treatment of detainees, and few efforts have been made to bring senior-level perpetrators to account. Congolese security forces have carried out politically motivated arrests and other abuses against members of opposition parties, journalists, and human rights activists. Judicial authorities have failed to appropriately investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence during the flawed 2011 elections. In a positive step to end impunity for serious abuses, M23 commander Bosco Ntaganda surrendered to the United States embassy in Rwanda in March 2013, and was transferred to The Hague where he awaits trial by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.