As a follow-up study to Gregory S. Paul’s ground-breaking treatise which shows that religious countries aren’t very good, I conducted an exhaustive review of my own.

OBJECTIVES AND STRUCTURE

My research attempted to discover any correlation between visits to the Gleeson Bloglomerate (a website located at blog.gleeson.us) and basic measures of societal goodness.

For my representative sampling of societies, I chose all those countries beginning with the letter U: Uganda, the Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and Uzbekistan. Additionally, I included Colombia, as an example of a country not beginning with the letter U.

DATA

First, I tabulated the frequency of visits to the Gleeson Bloglomerate originating from any of these societies, expressed as a percentage of total visits to the Gleeson Bloglomerate.

TABLE I: Visits to Gleeson Bloglomerate (Expressed as a Percentage of All Gleeson Visits) by Societies Beginning with U, Plus Colombia

(Source: Sitemeter)

The values for this measurement ranged from 0.01 (for Uganda) to 65 (for the United States). Using these figures as a baseline, I proceeded to ascertain their possible correlation to basic measures of societal goodness, with “societal goodness” defined as those quantifiable quantities which tend to make a society gooder.
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Back in April, Laurence Simon set up his own “Avignon Edition” of the Carnival of the Vanities, because the official version was ghastly. He’s done it again. (And this time, the Carnival even contains a Gleeson post, which automatically makes it worth seeing!)

UPDATE Now comes Ferd the Cat, with yet another edition of the very same Carnival! I do believe this is the first three-way schism in the Carnival’s august history. In keeping with Simon’s “Avignon” terminology (a reference to the Great Schism of the West, which saw competing claimants to the papacy in Rome, Avignon, and Pisa), I think we shall have to dub Bruce’s the “Pisa edition.” (Correction: I mean Ferd’s, not Bruce’s. I get those two mixed up a lot, sorry.)

United States Chief Justice nominee John Roberts was confirmed in 1967, by Andrew Grutka, the Bishop of Gary, Indiana.

In the current (2005) Journal of Religion & Society, one Gregory S. Paul has given us “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies” (which for purposes of brevity, I shall henceforth refer to as ‘CNCQSHPRSPD’).

Mr. Paul’s paper purports to show an inverse correlation between what he calls “religiosity,” and what he calls “societal health.” In other words, believing in God and going to church and suchlike behavior will tend to make a society sick. To determine the ‘health’ or ’sickness’ of a society, Paul tabulated some “basic measures of societal health,” like homicide rates, abortion rates, and suicide rates.

Paul does cautiously note (in paragraph 12) that “it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions,” but of course he pretty much assumes a causal link, and hopes you’ll do the same. His hope is not altogether in vain, if “Cookie” is any indication. Cookie happily links to Paul’s treatise with the helpful introduction, “If you’ve always suspected the wingnuts are — well, nuts… here’s your proof.” (But the author of the study himself just admitted it isn’t proof! Oh, well…)
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According to an ad agency survey, fully 70 percent of English tavern owners, cabbies, and hairdressers have no idea what “blogging” is. Furthermore, many of them think that blogging is synonymous with “dogging,” which is British slang for, um, copulating in public.

Mike of OkieDoke is curious whether this misapphrension is quite as prevalent in Oklahoma as in the mother country. I sure hope not. I’ve already mentioned to some of the people at church that my wife and I do a bit of blogging.

The Gleeson Bloglomerate turns one year old today. I’ve written a lot of posts over that year. Maybe not as many as I would have liked, but a lot nonetheless: several hundred of them. Some of these posts stand out in my own estimation as the very best. In case you would like to know which these are, I’ll list them, with handy links.

In the political satire genre, I still enjoy re-reading my parodies of the 2004 presidential debates:
The first debate
The Cheney- Edwards- Abby- Bede- Faith debate
The final debate, finally

News parodies don’t always age well, but these two have managed to stay topical enough to be morbidly funny:
ACLU launches kid-kicking campaign
Google to index all human souls

My works of short fiction:
Leo Learns His Lesson
The Case of the Misbegotten Memos
Internemesis

My life-long love affair with comic books:
Jinkies, It’s Murrow’s Ghost!
Confirmation Comics
True Blog Comics

My ruthless fisking of clueless bystanders:
An open letter to Mazzio’s pizzeria
News 9 Hates Homeschoolers

My contraptions:
The Autorantic Virtual Moonbat
Find the Pork

If you like this sort of stuff, all I can say is, thanks! Keep reading, because this is the sort of stuff I do.