American Atheists and Agnostics divorce rate below average

"In addition to finding that four out of every five adults (78%) have been married at least once, the Barna study revealed that an even higher proportion of born again Christians (84%) tie the knot. That eclipses the proportion among people aligned with non-Christian faiths (74%) and among atheists and agnostics (65%).



Barna Group, March 31, 2008

Not such a big surprise, but I post it so you can all see that Atheists and Agnostics fare pretty well in their marriages. One could argue that since these infidels are less inclined to marry, they ought to have a higher success rate anyway. On the other hand one could argue that religious people seem to marry for less than good reasons.
I see Asians have a low divorce rate, no thanks to Muslims who (depending on their denomination) can have four wives and marry and divorce for a night. I mean, I wonder what the divorce rate in Iran is where one-night-stands, I mean marriages, are accepted.

"Malaysian man gets divorced twice in one day
It is not unusual for the many wives of a Muslim man to put up with each other for the good of the household, but two Malaysian women got along so well they decided to leave their husband at the same time."

Guardian, April 2 2008

That also reminds me:

"The extravagant side of Mohammed bin Laden's nature made itself evident when it came to women. Islam permits a man four wives at a time, and divorce is a simple matter, at least for a man, who only needs to declare, "I divorce you." Before his death, Mohammed bin Laden officially had fathered fifty-four children from twenty-two wives. The total number of wives he procured is impossible to determine, since he would often "marry" in the afternoon and divorce that night. An assistant followed behind to take care of any children he might have left in his wake. He also had a number of concubines, who stayed in the bin Laden compound if they bore him children. "My father used to say that he had fathered twenty-five sons for the jihad," his seventeenth son, Osama, later remembered."

Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower (p71)

So there you see, Osama bin Laden shows what will happen when parents divorce!
That doesn't bode well for USA, which is the country with the highest divorce rate (despite being such a God-fearing country).

Lastly, a bit cheesy video with different, and lower divorce rates:

Why religion is the cause of religious terrorism

"[According to former CIA officer Marc Sageman. ] the first wave of Al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is now down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in Al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less have the power to provoke a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, who were well-educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for action.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank in Washington. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's samples) have attended radical religious schools. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids - closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics."

David Ignatius, Daily Star (Lebanon), February 28, 2008

Ever since 9. September 2001, there has been people from all sorts of backgrounds who have tried to state again and again and again that religion has nothing to do with terror. For a large part, this is pure revisionism based upon unwillingness to face the truth that religions carry a lot of unhealthy ideas.

With the same logic, WW2 didn't happen because of Nazi ideology, but because of the Versailles treaty. No-one would doubt that the Versailles treaty had an effect, but you would have to be retarded to say that National-Socialism had nothing to do with it. But let's move from WW2 to present day neo-nazism. It is of course a bleak shadow of the heyday of NS-DAP. Hitler is their hero, and that's about it. A lot of the racist attacks on immigrants etc. happen because the racist is an uneducated, unemployed drunkard. But he is also a fan of Hitler, and Nazi ideology offer the framework where attacking immigrants on the street is OK. The SA would have done it like they do, and the SS would have been more thorough.

That's what the afore mentioned revisionists don't see, that while the jihadi theology may be a poor excuse, it is still a theology. They have simply distilled certain values from traditional Islam. (And if Islam was a really peaceful religion, as is often claimed, then this would be impossible.) The fact that the majority of Muslims may have a different view doesn't matter, because the majority of Christians had a different view than Martin Luther when he begun his work too. All religious reformers start off at the fringes.

I think Marc Sageman is onto something when using three categories of terrorists, like above. The London bombings was a copycat crime by fans. No doubt about that. And they're probably not very well edumecated in Islam either. But their faith provided a framework for the act, and Islam provided a framework for jihadi interpretation.

Why Are Atheist Books Best Sellers?

"First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.
How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.
If the same were true of vegetarians -- if mass murder and violent intolerance were carried out by vegetarians -- there would be a backlash against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong feelings about the doctrine."

realclearpolitics.com July 10, 2007

That's all very well, but here's an interesting part regarding the very "unfortunate" secularisation of Europe.

"I have taught college students and have found that their ignorance not only of the Bible but of the most elementary religious arguments and concepts -- such as the truism that if there is no God, morality is subjective -- is total."

Morality is subjective. Heard it all before, yet monkeys help eachother. Now watch this:

"Indeed it is virtually impossible to distinguish between a liberal Christian or Jew and a liberal secularist. Neither holds any text to be divine, both get their values from their hearts and minds, and they come to identical conclusions about virtually all moral issues."

How's that for "subjective morality"?
This just goes to show that the sum of human experience, or the human history if you like, has given us more information about good morality than religious texts.

While I think Prager has some nice clear thoughts in between here, he conveniently forgets that it's not only Islam which is the background for these books. American creationism is considered as maybe the most puerile fringe of Christianity. A couple of pedophile priests would never sway anyone, but systematic idiocy will.
Islam is a very serious problem, of course, but being liberals we are terribly understanding to people with lousy childhoods and poor education in violent countries. But God-fearing Americans have the possibility to get a proper education, and all they wish is to corrupt it with silliness from Genesis.

Terrorism may have been the final straw, but the reason why Atheist books are best sellers is because there's a lot more to religious problems than Osama Bin Laden.

Muslim Americans, White Evangelicals Similar in Religious Fervor

"The Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Muslim Americans, 80 percent of white evangelicals, and 87 percent of black Protestants say religion is "very important" in their lives.

These high percentages stand in contrasts to Catholics, only 49 percent of which said religion was "very important" in their life, and white mainline Protestants, only 36 percent of which responded likewise.

Moreover, Muslim Americans are similar to white evangelicals and black Protestants in their tendency to personally identify themselves first by their religion before their nationality.

[...]

The majority of white evangelicals (66 percent) and black Protestants (68 percent) said they take a literal view of the Bible, while half of Muslim Americans consider the Koran as the literal word of God."

Christian Post, Jul. 10 2007 (See also How Muslims Compare With Other Religious Americans )

Evangelicals, the new Muslims! The next Osama bin Laden is apparently going to be white, and will love Jesus.

Newsflash: Christian Terrorist Cell Caught in Texas