I hadn’t planned to blog today. I’ve posted a lot of stuff here lately and apparently it wasn’t very good. But then a few of my friends posted some really bizarre stuff online and I felt the need to answer. More of the “we’re screwed without God” stuff. They apparently believe that “GOD IS STILL IN CONTROL” and all will be well if we just have faith. And Trump is still President. And January 6^th was a false flag operation. And Covid-19 was a hoax. And vaccines will make you have 3-eyed babies. What a steaming pile. I had to vent so my head didn’t explode. I mean, I’m not surprised that they post this stuff. People who believe in magical spirits and miracles will believe just about anything (unless of course it makes sense). It was just the amount of it in one day that I found disturbing. Maybe they were feeling all churchey since it’s Sunday (or it was when I started this little project).

Anyway I did a little research Googling around and cobbled this table (below) together. From what I can see, it’s as most of us already knew / suspected. God doesn’t have anything positive to offer for society’s ills. You can however make a case for religion being at the root of many of our troubles. I say this because the deeply religious quite often ignore or even avoid real knowledge in favor of all that godly bullshit in their Bible. It’s about education (or the lack thereof). The evangelicals constantly harp on how we need God back in our schools. No, we don’t. We need to keep religion as far from our public schools as is humanly possible. Religious faith is rooted in ignorance. A populace with a quality secular education is the blood enemy of all religion.

Anyway, make what you will of the data. Word Press doesn’t support javascript so I can’t make it sortable. I may put a copy of it up elsewhere so it can be sorted by clicking the column headers. Note that higher rates of graduating HS generally lead to lower poverty rates and lower crime rates. Not always but usually. And for the most part, the least educated states tend to be the most religious. That’s not a coincidence.

Also note that the biggest statistical anomaly is the District of Columbia. This is because the city is mostly a ghetto. It does have its nicer areas but these are mostly inhabited by lawyers, lobbyists, politicians and other forms of human debris. DC has a terrible school system in spite of every effort to fix it. So yeah there are a lot of college grads in DC. But a disproportionate number of them are not from DC. They’re outsiders who live and/or work there within the American political machine.

Sources at the end of the table.

Sources

• US Literacy By State (2017)
• District of Columbia Poverty Rate (2019)
• US Poverty Rate By State (2019)
• US Violent Crime Rates By State (2020)
• Public School Ranking By State