EDITORIAL FEATURES 5 The New American Plutocracy WITHOUT THE Paul Kurtz WALL 29 Introduction: 0 P- ED Visions of Theocracy Tom Flynn 6 Are We Evolved free inquiry l- Yet? 30 The Real Victims of a Wendy Kaminer F A LL 200 0 VO L. 2 0 ' NO . 4 Church-State Merger I SSN 0272-07 0 1 Alan M. Dershowitz 8 A Woman's Body as Political Territory 32 Woman's Fate Marilyn French Katha Pollitt 34 When Public Schools 10 A Message from the Get Religion Human Genome Rob Boston Christopher Hitchens 36 The New 12 The Republic of Constitution and Sex Feelings Vern L. Bullough Christina Hoff Sommers 38 The Religious Right, 14 Does the First Theocracy, and Amendment White Supremacy Protect Theft and Norm R. Allen Jr. Arson? 40 'Comstockery': Nat Hentoff When the Religious 16 When Good Books Right Wins Vanish Ransom Lewis Webster Mark Crispin Miller 42 When Sharia Becomes the Law 20 Freedom or Dogma of the Land in Academia Leo lgwe Daniel Maguire 44 The Intrepid Ethicist 21 Morally Straight An Interview with ... and Intolerant? Peter Singer Margaret Downey 47 Humanity's Worst 22 Zoophobia? Nightmare David P. Barash Senator Alan Cranston 23 The Right to Let Go 50 Are Atheists More Sally Cole Mooney Depressed than Religious People? Franz Buggie et al. REVIEWS 66 Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII DEPARTMENTS John Cornwell William Harwood 24 Frontlines 67 Ethics for the New Millennium 27 Letters His Holiness the Dalai Lama 55 Church-State Update Lou Matz Supreme Court Wraps Up 67 The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story Before Summer Break Tom Flynn Bernard Katz Ben Radford 57 Great Minds Matilda Joslyn Gage 68 Galactic Rapture Sally Roesch Wagner Tom Flynn Timothy Binga 63 Science and Religion Are Science and Re ligion 68 Phantoms in the Brain: Compatible? Part 2 Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind Tad Clements V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee 70 Humanism at Large David C. Noelle Abraham Kneisley .. FI Editorial Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief Paul Kurtz Robert Alley Editor Lewis Vaughn Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Univ. of Richmond, Virginia Managing Editor Andrea Szalanski Hector Avalos Associate Professor of Re ligious Studies, Deputy Editor Norm R. Allen, Jr. Iowa State University Columnists Nat Hentoff, Christopher Hitchens, Wendy Kaminer, Mark Crispin Miller, Joe E. Barnhart Professor of Philosophy, Katha Pollitt, Peter Singer, Christina Hoff Sommers North Texas State University Senior Editors Vem L. Bullough, Richard Dawkins, Thomas W. Flynn, Martin Gardner, H. James Birx Professor of Anthropology, James A. Haught, Gerald A. Larue, Taslima Nasrin Canisius College Associate Editor Wendy McElroy George Bishop Professor of Political Science, Contributing Editors JoAnn Boydston, Paul Edwards, Albert Ellis, Roy P. Fairfield, University of Cincinnati Charles Faulkner, Antony Flew, Levi Fragell, Adolf Gri.inbaum, Marvin Kohl, Rob Boston Author, Americans United for Thelma Lavine, Joe Nickell, Lee Nisbet, J. J. C. Smart, Svetozar Stojanovic, Separation of Church and State Thomas Szasz, Richard Taylor Barbara Forrest Associate Professor of Philosophy, Editorial Associate Warren Allen Smith Southeastern Louisiana Univ. 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Stenger Anthony Santa Lucia, Ranjit Sandhu, John Sullivan, Kathy Vaughn, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii Vance Vi grass Edward Tabash Civil Liberties Attorney, Honorary Chair, Executive Director Emeritus Jean Millholland Center for Inquiry West Visit Free Inquiry's web site at http:jjwww.secularhumanism.org FREE INQUIRY (ISSN 0272-0701) is published quarterly by the Council for Secular Humanism, a nonprofit educational cor­ poration, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226. Phone (716) 636-7571. Fax (716) 636-1733. Copyright ©2000 by the Council for Secular Humanism. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without permission of the pub­ • lisher. Periodicals postage paid at Buffalo, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. National distribution by International II Periodicals Distributors, Solana Beach, California. FREE INQUIRY is available from University Microfilms and is indexed in Philosophers' Index. Printed in the United States. Postmaster: Send address changes to FREE INQUIRY, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or publisher. No one speaks on behalf of the Council for Secular Humanism unless expressly stated. Are Atheists More A NEW STUDY TELLS THE TALE Depressed than Religious People? Franz Buggie, Dorothee Bister, Gisela Nohe, Wolfgang Schneider, Karl Uhmann n recent years, the view that religious belief and participation in religious acts of worship has a positive effect upon the well­ I being of man has repeatedly been publicized in the German­ speaking sphere by high-circulation magazines such as Der Spiegel and popular-science periodicals like Psychologie Heute, which cite epidemiological inquiries and quantitative research.1 These articles also suggest that religious people are able to cope with crises in their lives, with stress and psycho-social conflicts, more easily and develop highly effec~ive coping strategies; moreover, they state that faith has a positive effect upon psychological and even physi­ cal health. A mass inquiry conducted in 1992 among members of the two major churches in Germany (Roman Catholic and Lutheran Protestant}, for example, revealed that self-perceived satisfaction with life was more than 10% higher among regular church-goers than among those who do not go to church. This statement, among others, seemed to confirm the results of previous extensive stud­ ies, all of them suggesting that devout and practicing adherents of a religion were generally less prone to depression than persons who were brought up in religious faith but had turned away from church later in their lives. 2 Other inquiries that were conducted among smaller populations, too, lead to the assumption "that religion has a slight positive sum effect on self-perceptions of happiness." In his essay "Can Religion Make You Happy?" (FI, Summer 1998}, John F. Schumaker gives a survey of seven · quantitative studies dealing directly with the two variables, and of 20 others that operated with components of "happiness," all of them rendering more or less the same results. 3 free inquiry so These kinds of studies have repeatedly been criticized, and members), the assessment of the test persons' statements by rightly so, pointing out that the effects described are not the means of the BDI scale, where higher values also mean a high­ result of religious belief but of other factors, such as social er proneness to depression, suggests that significantly fewer support, conformity, etc. On no account does this mean, how­ (in statistical terms) signs of depressive conditions were to be ever, that the results of these studies can be rejected altogeth­ noted with strictly religious persons than with those to whom er. But the question arises as to whether they were not princi­ faith is of relatively little importance.6 The authors determined pally distorted by a systematic error made in designing and performing the studies. All of the These kinds of studies have studies mentioned have a serious methodologi­ cal deficiency: none of them examines a control repeatedly been criticized, and rightly group of determined atheists whose psychic condition is, for example, compared to that of so, pointing out that the effects groups of half-hearted wavering atheists and groups of persons ranging from the only slight­ described are not the result of ly religious to religious fanatics. Moreover, the religious belief but of other factors. epidemiological studies suppress the fact that the absolute number of determined atheists in the total popu­ an average value of 4.6 for all church members they had ques­ lation is very small in relation to the number of more or less tioned. Moreover, they subdivided the test groups according to religious people. By no means, however, may the unequal dis­ how close their emotional ties with religion and church were. tribution of the two groups within the basic total number play The values they determined were 3.4 for the strictly religious a part in a qualitative comparison between them. This fact group, 6.0 for the less religious group, and 4.0 for the group of has to be given due consideration with any experimental moderately religious people, which means the highest degree design if it really is to meet the methodological criteria. of depression was found in the sub-group of the least religious A study we conducted ourselves among determined athe­ persons.