Mark Keown

 It is common in our western cultures to speak of “religion” to describe an entity of people who believe in God or gods or who adhere to a particular religious group. It is fair to call such groups religions, we have to call them something. It helps in analysing the differences across humankind. However, what then happens is that others can use this label to make gross generalisations such as blaming religion for ills in the world, like war. They can put people down who do believe in God or gods as inferior because they submit themselves to the said religion’s creeds and ideas. It can become politicised, stigmatised, and weaponised. This has happened in western cultures. Such putting down and labelling is naïve as all humans are religious and submit to something or someone. For some people, it is the government. They look to the government to solve the ills of the world and believe in it. When there is a problem in society, they expect governments to fix it. We see this in NZ w...

I was interested to read on Teletext this morning the results of a Newsweek poll on American religious views. You can read about it at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17879317/site/newsweek/ The core results for American Adults are: 91% say they believe in God. 87% say they identify with a specific religion. 82% identify themselves as Christians 5% follow a non-Christian faith; say Judaism or Islam. 48% rejects the scientific theory of evolution 34% of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. 73% of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 39% percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41% of Catholics agree with that view. 10% identify themselves as having "no religion" 6% say that they don’t believe in a God at all. 3% of the public self-identifies as atheist 47% of the respondents felt the country is more accepting of atheists today than it used to be What do we make...