Religion is in the news rarely and when it is, it’s usually in the form of bad news or attack. At present it’s the use of the Lord’s Prayer before beginning the day in Parliament and the religion question in the current census, which has called forth from some commentators a campaign to urge people not to tick the religion box if they’re not regular church attenders. The point of this is to reduce the amount of money the government allocates to religious bodies. Effectively, it’s part of an anti-religion campaign waged by some media, such as The Age (Melbourne), the Sydney Morning Herald, and the ABC. Keyboard warriors – militant atheists – have taken up the call with energy. However, this area is bedevilled with ignorance and wild assertions unsupported by data. This article is dedicated to injecting a factual assessment into the debate.

MYTH vs FACT

Myth #1:
Religion is on the decline and the number of atheists is rising. Religion is a minority interest.

Fact:
According to Pew Research, in 2010 the world population was 6,895,850,000. 16.4% were unaffiliated with any religion. So 83.6% of the world’s people are religious. Their projections suggest that the percentage of unaffiliated will have declined to 13.1% by 2050.

“The total number of religiously unaffiliated people (which includes atheists, agnostics and those who do not identify with any religion in particular) is expected to rise in absolute terms, from 1.17 billion in 2015 to 1.20 billion in 2060. But this growth is projected to occur at the same time that other religious groups – and the global population overall – are growing even faster. These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world’s population in 2060, down from roughly 16% as of 2015. And more than 700 million people of the 1.17 billion who do not identify with any religion live in China” – where religion is banned.

In other words, when people are free to choose, they choose religion.

Myth #2: Atheists are rational and believe in science, whereas religious people deny science and believe in non-existent beings.

Fact:
Among the billions of religious believers are naturally many highly-educated people including scientists and mathematicians. Theology has been a discipline at universities from their beginnings (usually founded by the church) and continues today. Although some groups in the USA deny the science of evolution, the religious in general accept modern science and contribute to scientific understandings. The assertion is based on scientism, the belief that science has the answer to everything in life and that that which cannot be empirically proven does not exist. This narrow view is not accepted by most scientists. There are significant dimensions to human existence for which scientific proof is irrelevant – the arts, love, morality and spirituality.

“Many atheists think that their atheism is the product of rational thinking. They use arguments such as “I don’t believe in God, I believe in science” to explain that evidence and logic, rather than supernatural belief and dogma, underpin their thinking. But just because you believe in evidence-based, scientific research – which is subject to strict checks and procedures – doesn’t mean that your mind works in the same way. Scientific evidence does not tend to support the view that atheism is about rational thought and theism is about existential fulfilments. The truth is that humans are not like science – none of us gets by without irrational action, nor without sources of existential meaning and comfort.”

(Lois Lee, Research Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent. https://theconversation.com/why-atheists-are-not-as-rational-as-some-like-to-think-103563 September 27, 2018 7.38pm AEST September 27, 2018 7.38pm)

Myth #3:
The Bible is a made-up story and there was no such person as Jesus.

Fact:
The Bible is the most extensively studied document in the world. The Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) is a huge, complex, ancient set of writings that were originally oral, passed down through thousands of years and later written down and copied, that speak of the history of the ancient Middle East. Although individual accounts, names and events may be disputed, the general locations and much of the broad outline is accepted by experts.

“Most modern scholars hold that the canonical New Testament accounts were written between 70 and 100, four to eight decades after the crucifixion, although based on earlier traditions and texts. Some scholars argue that these accounts were compiled by witnesses although this view is disputed by other scholars. Archaeological inscriptions and other independent sources show that the Acts of the Apostles contains some accurate details of 1st century society with regard to titles of officials, administrative divisions, town assemblies, and rules of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Virtually all historical critics agree that a historical figure named Jesus taught throughout the Galilean countryside c. 30 CE, was believed by his followers to have performed supernatural acts, and was sentenced to death by the Romans, possibly for insurrection.” (Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew, Vol. II, Doubleday, 1994).

There is little dispute among scholars of all religions that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person. The area of contention is between what theologians call ‘the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith’. Jesus was a real person. But was he the Son of God, the Messiah? Christians believe so. Jews and Moslems regard him as a prophet or teacher. Whatever you think, he was an actual person whose life broadly followed the accounts in the Bible.

Myth #4:
The churches are full of paedophiles.

Fact:
In Australia, the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse found that 7% of Catholic clergy had been involved in child sex abuse. In the United States, bishops received allegations of abuse against 5.9% of priests between 1950 and 2002, according to the watchdog group BishopAccountabiligy.org.

96% of child sex abuse takes place within the family and is perpetrated and covered up by family members. “According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (2005) Personal Safety Survey, of all those who reported having been victimised sexually before the age of 15 years, 11.1 percent were victimised by a stranger. More commonly, child sexual abuse was perpetrated by a male relative (other than the victim’s father or stepfather; 30.2%), a family friend (16.3%), an acquaintance or neighbour (15.6%), another known person (15.3%), or the father or stepfather (13.5%)”

(Richards K 2011. Misperceptions about child sex offenders. Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 429. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi429)

Myth #5:
Wars are caused by religion. Get rid of religion, and there’ll be no more war.

Fact: “In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.

History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. Most modern wars, including the Napoleonic Campaign, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were not religious in nature or cause.”

(Rabbi Alan Lurie, Contributor Author, ‘Five Minutes on Mondays: Finding Unexpected, Purpose, Peace and Fulfillment at Work’ 04/10/2012 04:09 pm ET Updated Jun 10, 2012)

Myth #6:
The numerical and cultural domination of Christianity in Western countries is unfair to other religions and is a form of discrimination. In a diverse society, rituals such as the Lord’s Prayer are offensive to other religious groups.

Fact:
Members of other religions rarely express dissatisfaction with the presence of Christian ritual. This is presumably because they value freedom to practice their own religion, and do not wish to inhibit others in freely practising theirs. The vast majority of those who complain are atheists and secularists – the recent campaign in Australia against the Lord’s Prayer was led by Fiona Patten, leader of the Reason Party, a small political group focussed on anti-religion and liberalism in relation to drugs and sex work.

ISSUES WITH ANTI-RELIGION

Those who militate against religion would like to see it, if not banned outright, at least stripped off the tax-free status of religious charities, deprived of any government funding, removed from the public sphere entirely, and reduced to something believers can do in private. There seems to be a lack of grasp of the very considerable implications of this position.

1 The Right to Religion

Like most countries, Australia is a party to core international human rights treaties. The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief is contained in article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

“Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.”

(https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/human-rights-and-anti-discrimination/human-rights-scrutiny/public-sector-guidance-sheets/right-freedom-thought-conscience-and-religion-or-belief) (See also article 5 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) – external site and article 14 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) – external site)

Any reduction in the freedom to practice religion as outlined in the Article is in fact an attack on human rights and civil liberties. The fact that freedom of religion is a core component of the Covenant should alone give its detractors pause for thought. The only countries that ban religion are Communist regimes and dictatorships. That is largely because they see religion, correctly, as offering an alternative focus of being and allegiance to the State, and authoritarian regimes regard that as intolerable. Religion offers ways of thinking and believing that may conflict with State authority and the official narrative. As such, its suppression is part of the suppression of free thought in general practised by such regimes. Militant atheists appear to place a low value on religion as a civil liberty and human right. In that, they conflict with international human rights law.

2 The Social Contribution of Religion

One of the most critical factors ignored by those who want to abolish religion, is the gigantic contribution made by religion to Australian and global society. It’s the archetypal inconvenient truth.

“Church-affiliated or ‘faith based’ organisations (FBOs) occupy a major role in the Australian welfare services sector. Their sense of mission and core values of achieving social justice for the needy and vulnerable in society animate these organisations in the provision of social services to individuals, families and communities around Australia.

NGOs provide over half of all welfare and social services in Australia, with church-affiliated organisations essential to this provision (Oslington, 2015: 80). Of the 25 largest charity organisations in Australia, 23 are directly associated with Christian churches (Crisp, 2014: 101). The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission reported in 2015 that faith-based organisations are ‘by far the largest single category of charities in Australia,’ with 12,253 NGOs reporting ‘advancement of religion’ as one of their charitable purposes, collectively employing over 133,000 staff and utilising the services of at least 467,000 volunteers as of 2013. However, this is considered a significant underrepresentation of actual figures. Cleary’s 1994 study of Catholic human service agencies in Australia, for example, estimated that in the Catholic sector alone there were at least 130,000 paid employees. Australian FBOs deliver services relating to emergency relief, housing and homelessness, health, mental health, education, community development, advocacy, research, income support and other ‘social services,’ covering a wide and diverse range of community welfare needs.

For individual clients and service users, FBOs tend to provide more compassionate and ‘humane’ treatment than government welfare departments, and are less judgemental in practice and disinclined to issue sanctions. Clients and staff interviewed in Reeves’ study of eight NSW FBOs reportedly ‘felt that Centrelink treated people like numbers, whereas [the FBOs’] really cared for people at a deeper, more personal level’ (Reeves 2010: 116).” (https://medium.com/@tim.redfern/faith-based-ngos-in-the-australian-welfare-economy-a53aa5d5e38d)

Catholic Health Australia is the largest non-government provider grouping of health, community and aged care services in Australia. These do not operate for profit and range across the full spectrum of health services, representing about 10% of the health sector and employing 35,000 people.^[66] Catholic religious orders founded many of Australia’s hospitals. Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in Sydney in 1838 and established St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney in 1857 as a free hospital for the poor. The Sisters went on to found hospitals, hospices, research institutes and aged care facilities in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania.^[67] At St Vincent’s they trained leading surgeon Victor Chang and opened Australia’s first AIDS clinic.^[68] In the 21st century, with more and more lay people involved in management, the sisters began collaborating with Sisters of Mercy Hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney. Jointly the group operates four public hospitals; seven private hospitals and 10 aged care facilities.

An example of a Christian Welfare agency is ADRA (Adventist Development and Relief Agency).^[71] This welfare agency is an internationally recognized agency run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. ADRA is operational in more than 120 countries, around the world, providing relief and development, where ever needed. Within Australia they provide shelter, relief, and services to those in need. They have numerous refuges set up those suffering abuse, as well as shelters for those in need. As well many other things such as food distribution, op-shops etc.

There are substantial networks of Christian schools associated with the Christian churches and also some that operate as parachurch organisations. The Catholic education system is the second biggest sector after government schools and has more than 730,000^[73] students and around 21 per cent of all secondary school enrolments. It has established primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions in Australia. The Anglican Church has around 145 schools in Australia, providing for more than 105,000 children. The Uniting Church has around 48 schools ^[16][74] as does the Seventh-day Adventist Church.” (Wikipedia)

The Salvation Army is a Christian church and an international charitable organisation. The organisation reports a worldwide membership of over 1.7 million,^[3] It is present in 132 countries,^[4] running charity shops, operating shelters for the homeless and disaster relief, and humanitarian aid to developing countries.

After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the Salvation Army allocated donations of more than $365 million to serve more than 1.7 million people. The Army’s immediate response the mobilisation of more than 178 canteen feeding units and 11 field kitchens which together served more than 5.7 million hot meals, 8.3 million sandwiches, snacks and drinks. Its network of amateur ham-radio operators picked up where modern communications left off to help locate more than 25,000 survivors. As part of the overall effort, Salvation Army officers, employees and volunteers contributed more than 900,000 hours of service.

The Salvation Army helps more than one million Australians every year. In an average week, the Salvation Army provides an estimated: ^[15]

• 100,000 meals for the hungry
• 2,000 beds for the homeless
• 5,000 to 8,000 food vouchers
• 1,000 people with assistance in finding employment
• Refuge to 500 victims of abuse
• Assistance to 500 people addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling
• Several thousand people with counselling
• 3,000 elderly people with aged care services
• 1,000 people in the court system with chaplaincy services
• Family tracing services which locate 40 missing family members
  (Wikipedia)

In 2020 there were 4,006,974 students enrolled in 9,542 schools. About 2327.76 of these are Catholic or Independent. Government schools held the greatest share of enrolments (65.6%), followed by Catholic schools (19.4%) and independent schools (15.0%) (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/schools/latest-release)

There were 693 public hospitals and 657 private hospitals in Australia. The Australian Government provided 41% of public hospital funding and 24% of private hospital funding. (ABS)

3 Religion is Good for You

“Experts in various fields not related to the study of religion and opinionated commentators dismiss religion as being an unhealthy delusion, refer to the royal commission into child sexual abuse, decry church wealth and blame religion for the world’s wars. They won’t admit what a growing amount of research supports — religion is good for you and the community.

Here’s some of the research. Belief in a religion helps with mental health as it promotes self-control and self-regulation. Systematic reviews of the many studies undertaken show a consistent result; religious people are less depressed, have lower rates of suicidal ideation, substantially lower alcohol and drug abuse, perform better at school, have more stable marriages and fewer personality disorders.

Other reputable research suggests that religious people adopt healthy behaviours that lower the rates of heart disease, hypertension, stroke, dementia, immune and endocrine disorders, and cancer.

If you’re not too concerned about your health but more worried about your safety, then consider this. In research combining all studies on religion and youth crime across a 45-year period in the United States, religion was found to play a statistically significant role in lower rates of delinquency. Other studies show religious people of all ages are significantly less likely to commit crimes.

A recent report in Australia revealed that those who found religion became more generous, giving 1.5 times more to charities and 1.7 times more volunteering time. This type of activity is a major contributor to strengthening the ties that bind society together, something known as social capital.

Even when it comes to conflict around the world, the naysayers on religion have it wrong. A study of nearly 2000 wars through history found that historically 7 per cent were religious wars and only 2 per cent of all deaths were from religious wars.

We live in a time when religion is seen as bad, being religious as showing poor judgment and practising religion as deserving of contempt. Yet an Australia without a public presence of religious groups would be unrecognisable. Nearly two-thirds of all aged care services are provided by religious groups, one-third of students in Catholic schools are non-Catholic and nearly a quarter of all charities are religious.

Denis Dragovic (Honorary senior fellow at the University of Melbourne and a specialist on the role of religion and society.) https://www.smh.com.au/national/do-you-want-an-antagonistic-society-pitted-against-religious-voices-20181010-p508ss.html October 10, 2018 — 1.34pm)

It seems incredible that those who militate against religion do not seem to realise that if religion goes, so too will all this. Without religion, as Dragovic says (above) “we will all be worse off because whether it’s lower crime, increased social capital or strong charities, the way religion is practised in Australia makes it a social good that needs to be protected for the benefit of us all.” The 100,000 meals provided weekly by the Salvos alone; the hundreds of schools serving hundreds of thousands of students; the assistance to the homeless, the battered, the desperate, the poor, the migrant and refugee, the addict and the aged and disabled. All gone. And for what? So that the sensibilities of a small group of militants will not be offended? So that unbelievers will not be reminded of their disbelief? Whatever the reason, it seems a very, very high price for society as a whole to pay.