Tag Archive for 'religion'

The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans

Pharyngula has a nice table from Harris Interactive on The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans. I would love to see this broken down by field of postgraduate education. I suspect it’s all those theater and art graduate students that are tarring us with the 36% belief in ghosts.

Mixing Science and Policy must be done with neutral regard to religion.

Murtaugh(no link because his block got hacked or moved and I don’t know where to) is dissecting a study by the National Institute on the effects of on breast risk. Overall, there is no correlation, as the study shows, however when you look more closely at the data reported in the NYT article, you find that risk increases with the lateness of term of the . According to his math, this results in a grand total of about 1700 more breast deaths per year, or a 4.3% increase in breast deaths per year. To put this in perspective, smoking kills a half a million directly, any many more through secondary effects such as starting fires. If you want to attack a problem that causes unnecessary death, attack smoking, not late-term , which account for less than 10% of the abortions performed anyways.