No surprise here of course, but its nice to have a study and some data:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolution.html

[quote:81209f8917]First, the researchers found that the effect of fundamentalist religious belief on opinions of evolution was almost twice as much in the U.S. as in Europe.

Miller says the U.S. has a tradition of Protestant fundamentalism not found in Europe that takes the Bible literally and sees the Book of Genesis as an accurate account of the creation of human life.

After European Protestants broke off from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, they retained a hierarchy that remained part of the university system, Miller says.

"In the United States, partly because of our frontier history, most of the Protestant churches are congregationalÛthey don’t belong to any hierarchy," he added.

"They’re free to choose their own ministers and espouse their own beliefs."

That freedom also included the creation of their own Bible colleges for training ministers, Miller says.

"If you send them to a Bible college that teaches only the Bible, they’ll come back preaching only the Bible," he added.

"There are very few European counterparts to that." [/quote:81209f8917]

[img:81209f8917]http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/images/060810-evolution_big.jpg[/img:81209f8917]

Some interesting comparisons:

[img:81209f8917]http://www.rationalrevolution.net/images/atheismrate.gif[/img:81209f8917]

World Happiness:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uol-uol072706.php

[quote:81209f8917]
The 20 happiest nations in the World are:

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Costa Rica
14. Malta
15. The Netherlands
16. Antigua and Barbuda
17. Malaysia
18. New Zealand
19. Norway
20. The Seychelles

Other notable results include:

23. USA
35. Germany
41. UK
62. France
82. China
90. Japan
125. India
167. Russia

The three least happy countries were:

176. Democratic Republic of the Congo
177. Zimbabwe
178. Burundi[/quote:81209f8917]

Very interesting data and thanks for posting it.

I do always feel a bit odd with rankings like “world happiness”. So much depends on the design of the study. It’s not really clear that there is a single easily definable sense to the notion of ‘happiness’. It would be nice to know more about his methodology, but the website is less than fully informative.

Religious beliefs are a little clearer ... but Spain does show up as being 75% religious, which strikes me as high. My guess is that many spaniards self-identify as Catholic while at the same time believing virtually none of the Catholic credo and never going to church, except at birth, weddings and death. This sort of de facto agnosticism doesn’t get measured accurately by such a test.

For some reason the page for the happiness study has recently moved or changed, here is the cach:

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:tZ2B8B2lW-4J:www.le.ac.uk/pc/aw57/world/sample.html+happiness+map&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

:?:

That URL doesn’t take me anywhere.

Search in google for “happiness map”, should be the first item, the University study. Click on the cached version.

OK, very good, but there’s no additional information there on the methodology. They do provide a link for ‘more information’, but it’s broken.

Not a big deal by any means, but it might be nice to understand what they really were testing when they were ranking ‘happiness’. I mean, it’s not like anyone has a happiness meter that they can whip out in each country ...