The First Shall Be Last

A study just came out which compares a nation's churchiness with its generosity.

Nations where fewer people attend church tend to be more generous in their support for development in poor countries than those where church attendance is much greater, according to the third annual edition of the "Commitment to Development Index (CDI)", published this week in Foreign Policy magazine.
(snip)
Denmark received the highest Index rating, yet only three percent of Danes attend church at least once a week -- the lowest attendance rate of all 21 donor nations. While church attendance rose to 14 percent in second-place Netherlands, Sweden (3), Norway (5), and Finland (6) all had church attendance rates well below 10 percent.

Meanwhile, the most religiously observant country, Ireland -- where nearly two-thirds of the population attend church at least once a week -- ranked 19 in the Index, while the next two most-observant nations, the United States and Italy, ranked 12 and 18, respectively.

"It's often said that one should love they neighbour as one lives oneself," according to Foreign Policy, which noted in reference to the Index findings, however, that "where there is more preaching, there is less practicing."

What about the tsunami? Wasn't the US supergood on that front?

It noted, for example, that the U.S. Treasury last year imposed nearly two billion dollars in tariffs on imports from the four countries that were most affected by the tsunami -- India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand -- twice the 900 million dollars in relief aid approved by the U.S. Congress for the same countries last May.

They didn't measure Jeebus-approved "Homosexuals are Evil" platform, but something tells me that the results would be very similar.