Cleaning out my e-mail inbox today, I noticed an online acquaintance who is what I like to call an atheist fundamentalist sent me a link to this anti-religious page. The page puts forth several claims that religion is, in fact, a negative influence, but simply demonstrate’s the author’s complete lack of understanding basic principles of logic and of statistics (assuming any of these claims are even based on real studies — and given the lack of documentation, that’s a doubtful proposition).
Reading this page I am reminded of a classic way of pointing out a statistical/logical fallacy — namely that cities that have large numbers of churches also have very high numbers of arrests for crimes such as prostitution. Of course the real variable being measured by this comparison is population. The author of the anti-religious page has also mistaken correlation for causation and committed numerous other errors as well.