When I was growing up my parents never told me how to believe or what to believe when it came to religion. One Sunday I would go to the Baptist church on the corner. The next Sunday I would go to the Methodist Church around the corner. They asked me each time how I felt about the experience and each time I had to admit I was not impressed. I even went to Vacation Bible School one Summer and made crafts that depicted Jesus Christ. I never got it.

To this day, I still don’t get it and I wonder what all the fuss is about. So, I’ve been doing some research and have arrived at the conclusion that religion’s affect on society leans more towards the negative than the positive. So let’s take a look at what people are saying about whether or not God is bad for you.

First, in an article in the December issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer author of a book called Why Darwin Matters reports that in a study published in the Journal of Religion & Society, religious societies in eighteen developed democracies, are worse off than secular societies in regards to homicides, STDs, abortions and teen pregnancies. Surprising, huh? What is even more surprising in this study is that the U.S. scores the highest in religiosity (a belief in God, biblical literalism and frequency of prayer and service attendance) and the highest (by far) in these same negative social conditions. He goes on to say that the reason may be that these problems may have other causes entirely, or secular societies work better with such problems, or these problems are best fostered within the famility unit and not within a reiligious framework. But what is clear from this study is that there is an inverse correlation between religiosity and societal health.

In another aritcle in the Wilson Quarterly, Phil Zuckerman, an associate professor of sociology at Pitzer College, writes that “the most secular countries — those with the highest proportion of atheists and agnostics — are among the most stable, peaceful, free, wealthy, and healthy societies.” He reports that the top five nations on the United Nations’ Human Development Index — Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands — are all in the top 25 in proportion of non-believers. Even more impressive is that the nations where citizens have abandoned religion by choice also tend to do better on measures of well-being such as life expectancy, literacy, income, and education. Highly religious states do poorly.

However, when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering, religious people fare better. According to professor Arthur C. Brooks, in his book called Who Really Cares, he reports that religious people donate 30 percent more money than nonreligious people. In fact, they are more than three times more generous than secularists to all charities. And also, people who are religiously observant are less likely to commit suicide than others. These observations may indicate that religion may provide more comfort to the individual and offer some type of positive reinforcement through giving.

But do religious people donate because of guilt and fear or because they truly want to? Experience has taught me that religion has the tendency to make people feel guilty about a whole myriad of things. I know, I sat in that church pew. So they think to themselves, ‘hey, I’ll just drop some money in a bucket, then I’m done’. Whereas, nonreligious people tend to think along the lines of personal responsibiity and accountability. Aethists I know do not tend to rely on others for assistance. They tend to be more self-sufficient and concerned with what they have more control over, such as family and friends. They work more within the framework of the family, not with extended, interconnecting networks.

I also have observed that many religious people seem to feel they are ‘off the hook’ somehow because their God forgives their sins just by believing (how convenient). In the more moderate of these ‘off the hook’ behaviors are those who are rude and abusive to others in personal and financial matters. In the more extreme behaviors, even killing is justified, ‘in the name of God’, of course. Look at extremists who fight ‘holy wars’ because God tells them they are ‘right’ and everyone else is an infidel. Their jihad is to eliminate non-believers. What a minute — that’s you and me.

What all of this is telling me is that God may be good for some of us some of the time, but not good for all of us all of the time. This of course, is contrary to what religious leaders want us to believe. They get their power from their numbers — the more numbers, the more power. They want us to join the church, build our lives around it, live a compliant life, and give to the church, of course. In reality, religion is a big business — a really big business. And a business that doesn’t appear to be giving us a good return on our investment. So, when I read of evangelicals who state that non-believers can’t find the words to express why life is worth living, I think — it is the non-believers who are living the ‘right’ life. What do you think…is God bad for you?