Satan+Hell=Better Economy

The curious economic effect of religion

"A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies - and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

That hell could matter to economic growth might seem surprising, since you can’t prove it exists, let alone quantify it. It stands as one of the more intriguing findings in a growing body of recent research exploring how religion might influence the wealth and prosperity of societies. In recent years, Italian economists have presented findings that religion can boost GDP by increasing trust within a society; researchers in the United States showed that religion reduces corruption and increases respect for law in ways that boost overall economic growth. A number of researchers have documented how merchants used religious backgrounds to establish one another’s reliability."

I thought this was interesting....maybe religion does serve more functions than most realize.

It just makes sense; A person who believes he will be held accountable for all his actions in life by a higher power will be more trustworthy than someone who believes his ancestors emerged from the primal sludge and believes his life has no purpose or meaning.

The Church has long upheld that economics is a subset of ethics and morality. Economic principals are not an independent field and can only be properly understood when viewed throught the lense of ethics and morals.

The Church holds that responsibilities attached to the ownership of property, the principles of justice and equity in wages and comercial dealings, the lawfulness or unlawfulness of charging interest on borrowed moneys (It is unlawful to charge interest on an unproductive,ie non-comercial, loan), are questions of conscience which find practical application in every day of one's life.

A person who understands the moral and ethical principals involved in economics is most likely to be honest in his business dealings, seeking to give customers the best possible products and services at a fair price.

One who sees economics as being wholly detatched from morals and ethics will only serve the bottom line, trying to squeese every ounce of profit from the customer whith no remorse for cutting corners or outright cheating the customer in order to maximize profits.

A society with no moral or ethical compass to guide economic principals will quickly devolve into rampant corruption and economic uncertainty as no one will be able to trust anyone with their money and rules can change overnight, depending on who can afford to outbribe whom.

No wonder our economy is such a wreck today!

Of course religion makes for a better economy when the followers of the religion are actually trying to follow the realistic tenets of said religion (being "good" to other people, etc.) that doesn't surprise me one bit. It's just so unfortunate that it takes outright delusions to convince people to be good to each other - not just for being good - but because if you don't, you'll burn for all eternity. Awesome.

Edited because I wanted to note that I'm mainly focusing on Christianity in this post, because when you mentioned Hell... well, that's a mainly Christian belief.

[edit on 17/11/09 by Hereno]