Losing your religion can be good for your wealth, claims a new study carried out by the universities of Bristol and Tennessee. It argues that as nations become more secular, they tend to become richer.
Researchers examined the gross domestic product of 109 countries, alongside the importance of religion in the societies studied. They found that an increase in secularisation correlated with an average increase of £800 per person over a period of 10 years, and this increased further over subsequent decades.
This doesn’t strike me as at all unexpected. Christianity has never encouraged people of faith to focus on money and the accumulation of wealth. Jesus’s attitude was distinctly unmaterialistic: “Consider the lilies of the fields – they reap not, neither do they sow…”
In St Matthew’s Gospel, we are told: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt… But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.” A young man who seeks perfection is told to give away all his wealth to the poor. And St Paul warns that “the love of money is the root of all evil”.
So it follows that those who do not place emphasis on material values will usually not be as rich as those who do. Because that is the way to grow rich: focus on money and on wealth, and leave aside what stands in the way of material values. I was told this by a very rich man, the late Felix Dennis, who wrote one of the most persuasive books ever published about the accumulation of wealth, called quite simply How to Get Rich.
Felix’s central message was this: if you sincerely want to be rich, then regard money as your priority, giving it primacy over everything else. When you have made the money, then focus fully on defending it.
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This is an extreme position, and there are many admirable people of means who use their wealth altruistically and for the good of others. But it’s true that faith has placed more emphasis on the things of the spirit, and not on the material.
Kipling’s famous, if somewhat hackneyed, poem If has offended students at Manchester University and they have thus scrubbed it off a wall – since they regard Kipling as a racist.
In his equally renowned poem The White Man’s Burden, he uses language which surely seems offensive today, referring to conquered colonies as “fluttered folk and wild/Your new-caught sullen peoples/Half-devil and half-child.”
Whether Kipling was, by the measure of his time, fundamentally a racist is disputed – he wrote affectionately about India, for example. But it’s evident that he was a stalwart Protestant in his politics.
If has been interpreted as the essence of Protestant individualism: aimed at a man who needs neither priest nor intercepting saint to give him the backbone and character to stand alone.
Kipling identified with Ulster Protestants in their fight to stay British in his very fierce poem Ulster 1912. He envisages terror raining down on Ulster Protestants from Catholic quarters: “We know the war prepared/On every peaceful home/We know the hells declared/For such as serve not Rome.”
Kipling was almost certainly more anti-Catholic than he was racist, but I’m not aware that Rome has ever called for his prohibition.
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One of the most positive developments occurring in medicine is the procedure of corrective medical surgery for spina bifida performed on an unborn baby in the womb. This is done at Leuven teaching hospital in Belgium, but doctors at London’s University College Hospital are being trained in the surgery, which was pioneered by Prof Jan Deprest, the foetal surgery pioneer. (The procedure is being shown on the BBC’s Horizon on 26 July).
Some 95 per cent of mothers who discover their child has spina bifida – usually diagnosed around 20 weeks pregnancy – currently terminate the pregnancy. Prof Deprest believes advances in foetal surgery will bring about great changes for the condition of spina bifida in the next couple of years.
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