I hope they speak Norwegian in Hell !

One of the most recurring arguments against people who distance themselves from religion is that religion is the guiding post for living a peaceful and righteous life. A light house of morality.


Without the moral compass of religion, society will fall into chaos and immorality. Also that it will give a proper fostering ground for totalitarian regimes that will abuse the people and will enact genocide on the population, and more often than not the examples sited to back that argument is that of Stalin's USSR, Mao's china, and to a lesser extent Hitler's Germany (not that the country was anything but religious, although his personal religious belief do draw some question marks)

Now that is all fine and dandy, and ignoring the separation between a dogma and state systems since they view them as one and the same from a religious point of view. The biggest elephant they overlook is that atheism unlike religions for instance has no set and predefined dogmatic rules its essentially the lack of those that makes it what it is so you can't draw a 1-1 relationship based on that label to throw a blanket statement to encompass all what is atheistic.

so the argument is Mao, Stalin, & Hitler were evil and atheists so atheism is evil


Lets look at a country of heathens and disbelievers who boast a population of about 26% to 71% of atheists depending on your definition of the word. Where regular church service's attendance is about 10%. this is a place where the church has been reduced to a place were you hold some cycle of life(read birth, death, & marriage) events and has little to no relevance in the day to day life of people in the classical sense.

According to that argument you would expect such a country to have a rampant crime rate, since if there is no divine punishment there is no inhibitor for people's evil deeds. essentially we would expect it to be what we call a hell on earth *wink* *wink*

So what do we have here then, Norway (in case you missed what we have been talking about) is
The most peaceful nation on earth(the economist global peace index) ! with the top honors in a quality of life that is environmentally friendly and one of the best places to raise a family in terms of quality of living for women and children. It's also a given that they have exceptional press freedoms and rights movements. Also it just happens that due to this environment they have the second highest GDP per capita in the world. So at this point someone might jump and mention that Norway is an evangelical lutheran country with 83% of the population affiliated to the church of Norway but the reason behind that is simple. registration to the church is done at birth so the statistics are not representational of personal belief.


In no case is that an anomaly, there is a high correlation between how secular a country is to how high it ranks on these indexes that measure the quality of living. You notice that the more a country tries to adopt a religious inline political & economic legislations the further it drops in that scale (take the United states in the past 6 years and compare its rankings) . Nordic countries, Canada, New Zealand, Slovenia and other similar countries always rank consistently high on those indexes.

That just goes on to prove that slogans like "fill in the blank religion is the solution" or "without religion you can't have a moral and prosperous society" are bunked.
Or the alternative you can hope that Norwegian will be the official language of hell, and the prince of darkness is brushing up on his Norwegian.

ENJOY!