Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard commnets.
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John Quiggin 
Have posted over at http://eaglesplace.blogspot.com on a published article of Gregory S Paul which concludes that religion is more likely to breed crime than secularism. Now the only Gregory S Paul I can locate seems to have specialised in paleontology and dinosaurs. Would someone care to have a look and comment on the validity of the research?
Iraq is in chaos and already the familiar voices are talking about military action against Iran. Many pro-Israel supporters hope the US will do its dirty work, once again. This kind of madness must be stopped.
http://antonyloewenstein.blogspot.com/2005/10/itching-for-fight.html
Brigid,
The research isn’t earth-shattering, so far as I can see. Yes, Paul is a paleontologist – a free-lance one at that. Nevertheless, his work in his own area seems respectable (perhaps better than respectable – it’s hard to tell from outside). The Journal of Religion and Society is refereed, but fairly low in the pecking order.
Paul’s aim is fairly limited: he calls it a preliminary study, and that seems fair enough. He aims only to establish a correlation between religious belief and various social indicators. He finds that across the Western world, homicide, rates of abortion and STDs, and health statistics. The problem that Paul simply sets aside is that correlation does not establish causation, and that therefore there may be some third factor at work, and also that the set of data is not really big enough to be sure that what we’re seeing isn’t an artifact.
I don’t think Paul has shown (or claimed to have shown) that religious belief causes social ills. He has, however, done something valuable: that there is little evidence for the virulent meme that the opposite is true: that decline in belief causes immorality. The best we can say for the research is that it helps shift the burden of proof on this particular debate toward the ‘religion is good for morality’ camp.
I have large concerns about the balance between civil rights and the, so called, war on “terrorism”. It seems to me that if there is a large threat ,the population should be told. If draconian laws are necessary, why not a bit more transparency?
Our Attourney-General has proved, less than apt, in his previous Migration portfolio. Can this bloke be trusted with powers so extreme?
Antony,
any suggestion that the US (which would have zero allies) can or would do anything about Iran is laughable, and totally flies in the face of reality.
Politically, have you seen how Bush is doing in the polls?
Militarily, have you seen US recruiting figures for the past several years?
Geographically, have you compared a map of Iraq with one of Iran?
It categorically WILL NOT HAPPEN. Only in some PNAC wet dream.