Posts Tagged ‘religion’

capitalism and the Bible

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

Catherine Rampell’s readers provide her with examples of anticapitalist passages in the Jewish Bible.

As described in Leviticus 25, every 50th year is a jubilee year, during which slaves are freed and property is returned to its original owner.

Debts are forgiven even more frequently. Just as God rested on the seventh day, I.O.U.’s get wiped out every seventh year. From Deuteronomy 15:

At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel the loan he has made to his fellow Israelite. He shall not require payment from his fellow Israelite or brother, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.

I can think of a few American homeowners who might support reviving this rule. Maybe a few countries, too. Oh, but wait — the biblical passage continues:

You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your brother owes you.

Sorry, Greece.

Catherine Rampell, “Reader Response: Bible-nomics“, Economix, 3 February 2012.

Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The New York Times. This, and her earlier post, is in response to a recent op-ed column by Rabbi Aryeh Spero:

The mechanism of capitalism, as manifest through investment and reasoned speculation, helps facilitate our partnership with God by bringing to the surface that which the Almighty embedded in nature for our eventual extraction and activation. ….

Many on the religious left criticize capitalism because all do not end up monetarily equal—or, as Churchill quipped, “all equally miserable.” But the Bible’s prescription of equality means equality under the law, as in Deuteronomy’s saying that “Judges and officers . . . shall judge the people with a just judgment: Do not . . . favor one over the other.” Nowhere does the Bible refer to a utopian equality that is contrary to human nature and has never been achieved.

Aryeh Spero, “What the Bible Teaches About Capitalism“, The Wall Street Journal, 30 January 2012.

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Hitler and Darwin

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

Astrophysicist Coel Hellier debunks the absurd, but common, accusation that Darwinian thinking inspired the Nazi holocaust.

[W]hile Nazi racial doctrine and Mein Kampf share one feature with Darwinism, namely competition and selection, the Nazi doctrine is not derived from Darwinism and is fundamentally incompatible with it. Whereas Darwinism says that all humans have a common origin, that species and races are malleable, evolving over time, and that one could (as with all animals, and if one so wished) artificially control breeding to enhance and select desired characteristics, Nazi doctrine says that human races are distinct and primordial, created separately by the Will of God, who desires that they remain separate, that the moral imperative is to preserve the races in their current state by preventing any racial intermixing, which would be both harmful and sinful.

Above all, while any similarity with Darwinism is only in one mechanism, namely competition and selection, the Nazi motivation for keeping the races separate is profoundly anti-Darwinian and instead religious and creationist. ….

Thus to the Nazis Darwinism was something they largely rejected and opposed. As with many Christians they opposed Darwinism because it saw man as an evolved ape, whereas they saw man as God’s special creation, and they opposed Darwinism because it was materialist, stripping mankind of the spiritual dimension, and because it did not give man a moralistic destiny.

That is why, in a list of books they banned from Third Reich libraries, the Nazis listed:

“Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel).”

“Monism” is the idea that mankind is solely material, with no spiritual soul. Haeckel, as well as having been the foremost Darwinist in Germany, had founded the Monist League in 1905 (it was disbanded in 1933 when the Nazis gained power). The word “primitive” here is a pejorative epithet to denigrate Darwinism.

Coel Hellier, “Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism“, coelsblog, 8 November 2011.

The essay is illustrated and carefully researched, with numerous quotes and links to historical documents.

Coel Hellier is professor of astrophysics at Keele University in England and author of Cataclysmic Variable Stars: How and why they vary (Springer-Verlag UK, 2001).

HT: The Browser.

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on intelligent design

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

[Y]ou get design without a designer the same way the wind blows without a blower.

Andrew Brown, “A creationist’s ‘scientific’ disproof of Darwin’s theory of evolution“, 15 October 2011.

Journalist Andrew Brown is answering the question of a Penetecostal deacon from Lancashire: “How can you have ‘design’ without a designer?”.

HT: The Browser.

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schooling in Arab countries

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Arab countries spend a lot of their income on education–as a share of GDP, as much or more than the world average–but the quality of their schooling leaves much to be desired. This week’s Economist describes as “frightening” the “gap in the quality of education between Arabs and other people at a similar level of development” while acknowledging that Arab countries “have made great strides in eradicating illiteracy, boosting university enrolment and reducing gaps in education between the sexes”.

According to surveys, barely a third of Egyptian adults have ever heard of Charles Darwin and just 8% think there is any evidence to back his famous theory. Teachers, who might be expected to know better, seem equally sceptical. In a survey of nine Egyptian state schools, where Darwin’s ideas do form part of the curriculum for 15-year-olds, not one of more than 30 science teachers interviewed believed them to be true. At a private university in the United Arab Emirates, only 15% of the faculty thought there was good evidence to support evolution.

The strength of religious belief among Arabs partly explains their reluctance to accept the facts of evolution. Until recent reforms, state primary schools in Saudi Arabia devoted 31% of classroom time to religion, compared with just 20% for mathematics and science.

“Education in the Arab world: Laggards trying to catch up”, The Economist, 17 October 2009.

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religion and health

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I … find that, at least on average, over all [142] countries, and over countries sorted into income groups, religious people do better on a number of health and health-related indicators. These protective effects appear to be stronger the poorer is the country—… religion is a route to a better life in poor countries, but not in rich ones—and to protect men more than women, though this hypothesis requires more extensive investigation.

None of the results show that the health benefits of religion can be obtained simply by joining a church, or even by undertaking a serious conversion. People who are religious are almost certainly different from non-religious people in ways that go beyond their religiosity and beyond the basic educational and demographic controls that are used here. Even so, some of the correlations presented here are remarkably universal across the religions and countries of the world, and need to explained and better understood.

Angus S. Deaton, “Aging, religion, and health”, NBER Working Paper No. 15271, August 2009.

An ungated version can be downloaded here

Princeton economist Angus Deaton (1945-), current president of the American Economic Association, is well-known for his empirical studies of household behavior and for his research in health economics and economic development.

Professor Deaton in this paper assumes “a simple triangular causal structure, in which religiosity and religious practice are caused by income, education, age, and sex, and in which health is caused by religion, income, education, age and sex.”. He emphasises that he is actually measuring correlation, not causation: the latter is assumed, not proven. Many economists are not so careful, and claim too much for their econometric results.

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