Is Religion Bad for Society?

I saw this (London) Times story linked on the CTMag Weblog.

It states that:
“Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.”

“According to the study, belief and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems”

My first reaction was to ask the following questions:

1) Who’s actually committing the crimes? I’m assuming the study takes a macro look at societies without looking at the finer details. It’s not as if everyone in even the most religious society is a religious believer .

2) Even if the people committing the crimes were to say they were Christians, their actions in fact belie their profession of faith. Belief in the Christian God is of little help to societies if you don’t follow his commands. This showcases the problem of the nominal nature of religious belief. Many people say they’re Christians (because they were baptized in a particular church, for example) when they really are not. In other words, these folks don’t accept the historic and orthodox beliefs that all Christians have held for the past two thousand years (e.g. the authority of the Bible, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection). They are free to not believe these things, of course, but the honest thing on their part would be to stop calling themselves Christians.

3) Are these problems specifically a result of greater religious belief or something else? Could not one come to a different conclusion, namely, that a decline in religious (specifically Christian) belief over the past fifty years or so has been a greater factor in influencing these results? Notwithstanding all the media attention towards American evangelicalism, are there in fact more bible believing Christians in the U.S. than before? In addition, what impact does relativistic thinking within the church (and the consequent vitiation of her ability to make an impact on the surrounding culture) have on these results?

4) Could it be that a strong and vocal non-religious minority within the religious society is having an inordinately large influence on the citizens resulting in those less grounded in good (general) morals to gravitate towards crime and other deleterious behaviours?

Those were my initial thoughts. It’s well known that journalists haven’t much idea of how to report statistics found in various studies. We’re all familiar with how the media over simplifies, for example, health studies. They’re quick to say that a certain food or supplement or pharmaceutical drug is bad or good for you when the study they’re citing is far more nuanced and circumspect about it. So I recommend reading the analysis of this statistician. He takes a look at the evidence in the original study and finds it wanting.And in a follow-up he finds more problems.