The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in the liberal arts, [Arthur C.] Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income.

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The book’s basic findings are that conservatives who practice religion, live in traditional nuclear families and reject the notion that the government should engage in income redistribution are the most generous Americans, by any measure.

Conversely, secular liberals who believe fervently in government entitlement programs give far less to charity. They want everyone’s tax dollars to support charitable causes and are reluctant to write checks to those causes, even when governments don’t provide them with enough money.

Such an attitude, he writes, not only shortchanges the nonprofits but also diminishes the positive fallout of giving, including personal health, wealth and happiness for the donor and overall economic growth. All of this, he said, he backs up with statistical analysis.

“These are not the sort of conclusions I ever thought I would reach when I started looking at charitable giving in graduate school, 10 years ago,” he writes in the introduction. “I have to admit I probably would have hated what I have to say in this book.”

Still, he says it forcefully, pointing out that liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.

Philanthropy Expert Says Conservatives Are More Generous

Slavery has been the standard throughout world history. What is unprecedented is a society that willingly abolished slavery. And while Christians were not always united on the issue, slavery would not have ended were it for Christianity.

Slavery was common in ancient Greece and Rome, but it died out in the Middle Ages. Slavery only survived on the pagan fringes of medieval Europe, such as the Vikings of Scandinavia. This alone should be a strong testimony to the fact that Europe’s Christian nature led directly to opposition to slavery - why else would warlike feudal lords not take slaves?

In fact, the Catholic Church did oppose slavery. Here is an article by sociologist and historian Rodney Stark summarizing some of the positions of the Church and other prominent Christians during the early Middle Ages and beyond. His book, For the Glory of God goes into more detail.

Of course, some people have argued that serfs were effectively slaves. But this is not true. While serves were not free, they were still greatly elevated above slaves. Serfs were free to marry. Serfs owned land that they could pass to their children. They were allowed to keep the products of their land. On the downside, they were tied to the land, and owed labor to their seigniorial lord. They typically had to devote some of their labor to his land. Furthermore, the Church encouraged Lords to free their serfs as an act of piety (see page 287 of Western Europe in the Middle Ages).
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In fact, according to a 1999 study by The Barna Group Christians were more likely than non-Christians to get a divorce in America….

For the record, the Barna study asked people their religion, and whether they had ever been divorced. They were then shocked, shocked! to find that religious and non-religious people are equally likely to be divorced. This is often held up as evidence that religion doesn’t make you any less likely to divorce, which is complete hogwash.

News flash: Religious people are far more likely to get married in the first place. This is particularly true of the more conservative denominations like Catholics and Evangelicals. So even if the same percent of Christians and atheists have been divorced, the fact that Christians are far more likely to marry means that fewer of their marriages end in divorce.

In any case, the benchmark study in this area is the City University of New York’s American Religious Identification Study (PDF file here). For starters, the CUNY survey is almost 15 times as large (Over 50,000 respondents versus 3,800).
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“In philosophy, it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today” — Quentin Smith (atheist luminary), “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo, no. 2 (2001): 3.

Theistic philosophy - and physics - has undergone an explosion in the past several decades. Set aside your old “Hume, Kant, and Russell proved that there is no God” and make way for the new lines of evidence. If you read just one book on the existence of God, I would recommend God and Design, which is a collection of essays by scientists and philosophers on both sides of the debate, so you’ll get both perspectives. There are plenty of other books by physicists who believe in some sort of a higher power (whether Christian, Jewish, or some other alternative) than you can shake a stick at. A small sampling includes The Faith of a Physicist by J. C. Polkinghorne, The Mind of God by Paul Davies, The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder, and The Language of God by Francis S. Collins.

God? Or an Infinite Number of Unseeable Universes?

The teleological argument is the argument for the existence of God that most people find most intuitively appealing. It also has a lot of force, it was one of the key arguments that led to the atheist poster child, Antony Flew, becoming a deist. If there were just a slight difference in how some of the basic laws of physics were slightly different, then life on earth would be impossible. In this article for Wired Magazine, Greg Easterbrook writes:

In recent years, researchers have calculated that if a value called omega — the ratio between the average density of the universe and the density that would halt cosmic expansion — had not been within about one-quadrillionth of 1 percent of its actual value immediately after the big bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or experienced runaway-relativity effects that would render the fabric of time-space weirdly distorted. Instead, the firmament is geometrically smooth — rather than distorted — in the argot of cosmology. If gravity were only slightly stronger, research shows, stars would flame so fiercely they would burn out in a single year; the universe would be a kingdom of cinders, devoid of life. If gravity were only slightly weaker, stars couldn’t form and the cosmos would be a thin, undifferentiated blur. Had the strong force that binds atomic nuclei been slightly weaker, all atoms would disperse into vapor.

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So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets. — Matthew 7:12

The Golden Rule is probably the most universal of all ethical principles. It can be found in nearly every major religion from Christianity to Zoroastrianism. The Golden Rule is also one of the few ethical principles that can be proven in formal logic - the artificial language that philosophers and mathematicians created to bring rigor and clarity to philosophical debates. Who would have thought that you could prove an ethical principle?
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Contrary to the claims of the DaVinci Code, the real battle over the heart of Christianity is much more mundane and boring. It boils down to two different families of early Greek manuscripts - the Alexandrian Text and the Byzantine Text. There are only about 400 words in dispute between these two manuscript families out of about 140,000 words in the entire New Testament.

Nevertheless, there are important differences. The Byzantine Text has a deeper and richer spirituality. For example, in the 1 Corinthians 11:24 Paul quotes Jesus saying “This is my body, which is broken for you.” But in the Alexandrian Text says “This is my body, which is for you.” In both cases Jesus sacrifices himself for us, but the use of the word broken in the Alexandrian Text emphasizes the depth of suffering and sacrifice that Jesus makes on our behalf. The Byzantine Text includes the story of Jesus forgiving the adulteress (“He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.”) and the Byzantine Text also includes passages that make it clear that the Jews do not have a special responsibility for the death of Christ, whereas the Alexandrian Text is missing some of these passages.
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Great article by Rodney Stark debunking two myths. The first is that the world has become more secularized as it gets more modern. He quotes people claiming that over 300 years ago. The second point that he debunks is that Europe was a staunchly Christian during the middle ages. It wasn’t. Most priests could not read or write Latin and didn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer. Most Churches were tiny, way to small to seat a sizable percentage of the town’s population. In fact, only the larger towns and cities even had Churches. Christianity spread rapidly from person to person for its first 300 years or so, but once it became the state religion of the Roman Empire it became corrupted. The Catholic Church was more interested in baptizing kings and cultivating ties to wealth and power than it was in saving the masses. The secular Europe of today is probably more Christian than it was during the Middle Ages.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn’t a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it’s basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It’s very religious.

Read the full article here. It is long but worth the time.