Anglo-Saxon attitudes

The March 29th issue of The Economist had some interesting charts showing how Britons and Americans differ on several issues:

It's not surprising how many believes in God and Hell and attitudes to Atheist presidents, but I thought it was interesting to see the differences on Creationism and Intelligent Design in USA. That 20 per cent of Americans believe in Intelligent Design while 40 per cent of them believe in "The Bible" is in a sense good news, because it just shows that the problem is a lack of basic education. Intelligent Design is in many ways more insidious, while the bible version is much more primitive. I think good education stand a better chance with Creationism than with Intelligent Design, because ID is stupidity on a much more abstract level disguising itself as science. You also see that in Britain, there's slightly more people who believe in ID than Creationism.


As for values, the only place they seem to concur is about death penalty.



This chart is a bit difficult to read, but I think it's a summary of how they responded in the other charts after party lines. Notice how even English Conservatives are much more liberal with regards to religion and values than American democrats.

Categorising communities by religion is dangerous and counterproductive

"The Conservative party has commissioned a report about national security. One of the findings is that the Government is wrong to communicate with people from ethnic minorities as though they were members of groups rather than individual citizens.
(Read related BBC Story here)

The NSS has been saying this for years. The Blair Government created these group categories – mostly based on religion – to define whole swathes of the population. But the huge numbers who didn’t want to define themselves in this way were left without a voice.

[...]

Maryam Namazie and her recently-launched group, The Ex-Muslim Council of Britain, has vividly illustrated that there is no way that the label “Muslim” can be accurately attached to everyone who has come from a Muslim cultural background."

National Secular Society, 27.07.2007