In Reply to: Murder, STD & marital breakdown more common in religious cultures posted by Perry on October 14, 2005 at 19:14:31:
But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's ... It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if God does not exist, then everything is permissible". Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires".
The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should we care about other people's?
We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued on these pages last month, that "good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand".