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The point Sam Harris made in a speech the other day about the branding of "atheist" being no good is relevant to this argument. What luckyme and I want is the universal application of skepticism and reason, not atheism. There is no society or regime in history that has ever gone bad as a result of being too reasonable or too skeptical.
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If you're truly the reasonable man you suggest you are, then you should make the effort to do a fair analysis of the successes scored by Christian countries VS non-Christian countries VS atheist countries during the past 100 years. If you do, it's game, set, match on most any metric.
But you won't.
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As far as I know, there aren't any countries which enshrine Christianity as the national religion (I might be wrong about that, but anyway there aren't any major examples).
If you just mean nations with a high percentage of devoted Christians, I think you might lose. Check out this
list of countries ranked by church attendance; there are a few successful countries in the top 20 or so (Ireland, the US, Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands... if you really want to claim The Netherlands as a "Christian country"), but if you remove the ex-Communist countries from the bottom 30 or so, it's a who's who of successful countries. This suggests - shockingly enough - that it's Communism which wrecks your country, and that Christianity at best is irrelevant.
By the way, why are we restricting things to the last 100 years? Christianity shouldn't have changed in the last 2,000 years, being an eternal truth, so if Christianity is such a great foundation for a nation, shouldn't I be able to look at any period in history and find Christian nations to be virutous? But this isn't the case. Why, if I were a cynical man, I might be inclined to think this showed that (a) Christianity has nothing to do with the success of nations or that (b) Christian nations only became successful after Christianity was ameliorated a little by the use of reason and skepticism.
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Nice deflection. This wasn't about the Catholic church. You need to find some Christian philosophy in Hitler's acts. You won't. Buh bye.
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We'll get started on that just as soon as you detail how it was people demanding too much factual evidence to back up claims who were the driving force behind the Stalin and Pol Pot regimes.
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THere are certainly definitional issues. But overall, the great ecomonic powers of today have serious Christian roots, perhaps with fading church attendance, but solid roots. Then look at personal freedom and rights for women. Christian rooted countries are far and away in the lead here. Islam is a female's nightmare, only slightly better if male. North Korea will be found at the bottom of every metric and I doubt there's much sanctioned religion.
You can parse it and spin it as your agenda warrants, but the easiest living is found under the shade tree of Christianity. Why do atheists loathe this fact so very much?
Lastly, Europe's shining star, the new and perhaps only future hope, Ireland, still atttends Christian church in huge numbers. There's reproducing as well, unlike the rest of Europe where societal slow suicide is the norm.
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Is this correlation stronger or weaker when comparing white vs. non-white countries? Just wondering, you seem to be making some HUGe correlation/causation errors, just wondering what the boundaries were.