According to Harvard Business School's Clay Christensen, christian folks are more law abiding and better for democracy too.
In the clip, Christensen — a well-known management guru and author of the book The Innovator’s Dilemma — spoke about an encounter with “a Marxist economist from China.”
The economist purportedly told Christensen that the biggest surprise he received in the U.S. was to learn how critically “important religion is to the functioning of democracy.”
The visiting economist, said Christensen, contended that the reasons American follow the law is because “most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week and they were taught there by people who they respected.”
Americans, Christensen said, follow the law “because they had come to believe that they weren’t just accountable to society, they were accountable to God.”
Christensen went on to say that he is beset by a “vague nagging feeling that as religion loses its influence in the lives of Americans, what will happen to our democracy? Where are the institutions that are going to teach the next generation of Americans that they, too, need to voluntarily choose to obey the laws?”
The facts, said Silverman, run directly counter to Christensen’s assertion that less religion means more chaos and the collapse of civil society.
“In fact, in the United States, in states with the highest percentages of atheists, the murder rate is lower than average. In the most-religious states, the murder rate is higher than average,” he said.
“Further, on average and generally speaking, atheists have fewer divorces, abortions, and STDs, and lower poverty rates, homicide rates, overall crime rates, and teen pregnancy rates. As a demographic, atheists have higher IQs, incomes, education rates, and literacy rates, and more Nobel Prizes and university professorships,” Silverman continued.
So perhaps chrisitians are happier but they also might not be quite as smart or ambitious as atheists….
The only absolute truth is that nobody truly knows what the fuck this is all about, how we got here, or where it's all going. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
