NEWS: Religion's Role in Morality by Country

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/a-map-of-gods-countries/284469/

Although the Atlantic has a spotty relationship in my book, this brief article citing a study by the Pew Research Center is extremely thought provoking and straightforward. Answering the single question, "Is it necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person?" you can see clear divides in the world.

My observations: I don't think they asked the question correctly in Japan, where the response would correlate with results as having half the people saying "yes" in a country where I only know of three actively religious people who believe in a single, most likely Western "God" figure. Many people here may believe, for example, that Buddhist teachings offer moral value, but that would not be tied to a centralized god. From this, I believe the answer was either lumped into religion, or they were asking participants in the survey who were more likely "actively religious", otherwise the results would have been less than 5%.

Lol@America, Lol@China. Given their GDP, China is an outlier for saying "God and morals don't matter" and the US is high above the average for people saying "Faith in God is necessary for moral value."

As a person who believes in the self-determinate value of people calibrating their own moral compasses, any country in the purple range depending on an old book, written back when slavery and stoning to death were popular, to determine moral values will be put further down on the list of "Countries I Want To Be In". Anyone else note the irony that countries reporting God as a moral necessity are some of the ones where death by stoning and slavery are still pretty common? Wow, nice job their gods.

tl;dr, most religious texts are violent, antiquated self-help books on morality written thousands of years ago when you or your god could brutally murder someone for being wrong, while still espousing that it's bad to kill people, and folks in many countries still guide their morals from the stories in them.