OK, just for clarification I'll post again, but won't bring anything new up
Regarding the "quality of life" for both men & women, let me reiterate that I'm speaking generally, and referencing the environment of freedom that we currently enjoy. The actual mechanisms (greed, capitalism, hard work, lottery, whatever) that bring health or wealth to individuals are not within the general scope of my argument --- those are individual-level details.
I still can rectify the main issues brought up...
1) Technological/scientific development was not helped by Christianity
2) USA founders were not necessarily orthodox Christian, so Christianity is not behind the formation of the USA
3) Dark Ages (already referenced, actually), and evil acts in the name of Christianity
...using the last couple paragraphs of my post, as they were in my mind when I wrote it:
Like it or not, Western culture had it's origins deeply rooted in Christianity. If a culture is developed slowly over centuries by the combined actions of each little participant in that culture, and that the majority of the populations of Western culture have been driven/heavily-influenced/directed by Christian morals/values/practices, then one may conclude that, in fact, Christianity is what gives us (men & women) the freedom, quality of life, and comfort we have today. That's observation.
I liken it to what I do with tree-ring studies: in a given region, long-term forest growth is determined by climate trends. Each tree forms one ring per year, and the size of that ring is determined by growing conditions for that tree. Sample just a few trees, pool the data, and you get a little bit of the climate trend, but mostly statistical "noise" generated by other influences (soil, competition, disturbance, etc). Sample hundreds of trees in many locations, and you get a clear, common signal showing the climate trend for hundreds of years over the whole region.
Same goes for the previous argument: look at just a few people, and you get a lot of random noise. Look at the entire population over many generations over a long period of time, and you see the overall trends. Religion, especially when organized (meaning hierarchically regulated in real-time) at the regional or global level, can be used by the organizers to the detriment of the commoners. The perfect example of this is the pre-Reformation era in Western civilization.
There are always communication problems when people are operating with different definitions. When I say "Christianity", I don't mean a single organization, I mean the belief system based soley on the Bible. There are uncountable organizations and alterations associated with that definition, strung out like a bell-curve model, so bear with it.
Also, I'm pretty much leaving out historical and modern context
after establishment of our country, as the process to get us where we are now is a natural progression from that point, and only a tiny portion of history as a whole. So, the TV scammers, etc, really don't have anything to do with my argument --- except that they fit into that whole
organized at the regional level thing
.
Again, this is just scatching the surface, and it would take a huge amount of work to correctly articulate and defend my observations (and I know I can't be perfectly correct either), but I think it's worth considering.
Sorry, Kevin, but I had to
.