From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: The more religious the society, the worse the problems are. And if you don't believe it, consider some of the world's most irreligious societies, like Norway, Netherlands, and New Zealand. They're pretty nice places to live. Now consider some of the world's most religious countries, like Afghanistan and Congo. Those are places that people want to get out of. This is also true in a comparison across American states. The more religious, the more dysfunctional. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What we should wish as Americans is to be neither Afghanistan nor Scandinavia, but to be the United States of America, which as a culture has always done an incredible job of balancing some of the absolute, definite benefits of modernity, including religious toleration, a respect for pluralism, a refusal to simply sort of impose the totality of one religion's theological doctrines on society with an abundant faith in a cosmic purpose for the human race. And obviously there are downsides to religious intensity. Those downsides are often manifested in zealous intolerance. There are also serious downsides to religious indifference, which are often manifested in anomie, drift, and despair. And it is simply the case that if you look across the developed world today, there is a strong correlation between secularization and a kind of loss of faith in human purpose and the human future, manifested most starkly in the declining birth rates that make it extremely unlikely that Dr. Pinker's predictions about the inevitable triumph of secularism and humanism over religion will come to pass, because the secularists and humanists don't seem to be making the basic choices that would enable the continuation of the human race.