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posted by on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the natural-enemies dept.

Government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion increased in 2015 for the first time in three years, according to Pew Research Center's latest annual study on global restrictions on religion.

The share of countries with "high" or "very high" levels of government restrictions – i.e., laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices – ticked up from 24% in 2014 to 25% in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage of countries with high or very high levels of social hostilities – i.e., acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society – increased in 2015, from 23% to 27%. Both of these increases follow two years of declines in the percentage of countries with high levels of restrictions on religion by these measures.

Among the world's 25 most populous countries, Russia, Egypt, India, Pakistan and Nigeria had the highest overall levels of government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion. Egypt had the highest levels of government restrictions in 2015, while Nigeria had the highest levels of social hostilities.

Global Restrictions on Religion Rise Modestly

Does this reflect your personal experience ?


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:10PM (9 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:10PM (#496939)

    Right, but what is the trend? I'm pretty sure the male circumcision rate in the US was quite a bit higher 40+ years ago, probably well over 90%.

    From what I hear, over in continental Europe it's pretty rare outside of Jewish communities. It's really a strange US custom that doesn't seem to be very correlated with religion.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:35PM (8 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:35PM (#496952) Journal

    Yes, it is in decline in the U.S.

    It's really a strange US custom that doesn't seem to be very correlated with religion.

    Well, it is correlated with Judaism and Islam. But otherwise, it's mostly correlated with the rise of a distinctive American religion, i.e., organized "medicine."

    I already said this a bit below, but basically nobody who wasn't Jewish (or Muslim) in the U.S. in the mid-1800s was circumcised. But then doctors started using it as a "treatment" for various conditions. In some cases, it was a legitimate treatment, but in the final decades of the 1800s it became more standard for physicians to use it for all sorts of conditions that vaguely might have to do with genitals. It was a small step from that idea to the recommendation that infants be circumcised as a preventative. This became common on the advice of the burgeoning organized licensed physician movement in the U.S. in the early 1900s.

    Within a few decades, better understanding of many diseases meant that the original justifications no longer made sense, but doctors continued to advocate it (along with a battery of other weird stuff, a lot of which was borderline quackery) as part of their "hygiene" guidelines until the mid 20th century. (Part of those "hygiene" concerns, it should be noted, had to do with prevention of masturbation, which was also viewed by physicians as a matter of "hygiene" in that period -- and circumcision supposedly lessened it.)

    By ca. 1950, medical science had basically progressed to the point that any reasonable medical researcher could probably figure out that circumcision was unnecessary unless there was some serious physical issue... and yet it continued to be recommended by most doctors, largely because of the authoritarian structure of medical education in the U.S., which traditionally focused not on the most recent research, but on what a more experienced and senior physician told you was his opinion of the best practice.

    Seriously -- until the past few decades, there's a lot of the rise of organized medicine in the U.S. that looks a lot more like religious doctrine, propagated through societies of "initiates" who don ceremonial white coats, rather than "science." (Just in the past couple decades, with the rise of the "evidence-based medicine," the authoritarian education of doctors has finally started to decline more.) Thankfully, a lot of the quackery gradually worked itself out over the generations, but circumcision had become so well established by the mid-20th century as standard practice in the U.S. that parents EXPECTED it. To this day, the best predictor of whether an infant is circumcised in the U.S. has little to do with religion or socioeconomic status or race or whatever -- but with "whether Daddy is circumcised," because parents want kids who "look like Daddy."

    But if you're looking for someone to "blame" for the rise of circumcision, look at the religion-like indoctrination propagated by the burgeoning medical profession in the early 20th century.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:52PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:52PM (#496964) Journal

      By the way -- I should be clear that I obviously acknowledge modern medicine did a lot of good things. I only wanted to highlight the stronger role of tradition and authority in medicine and clinical practice, which often ended up promoting strange or even barbaric practices with little scientific evidence of effectiveness.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:04PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:04PM (#496971)

      Bias in the research...
      "If my dad and mom had me circumcised, it must be a great thing with positive effects"

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:06PM (3 children)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:06PM (#496972) Journal

      Sorry, one other thing I forgot to mention that played into this -- many people today don't realize this, but until the late 1900s doctors basically were taught that babies couldn't feel pain.

      I'm absolutely serious. It sounds INSANE, but it was standard medical teaching. Until the 1980s, lots of physicians performed major surgeries (like open heart surgeries) on babies with no anaesthesia. (Granted, anaesthesia was much more risky in earlier generations, but the idea that it wouldn't even be necessary for infants because they couldn't feel pain... that's the sort of nonsense only doctors could believe.)

      Anyhow, keep that in mind when you're judging the whole circumcision thing -- doctors legitimately believed that lopping off a chunk of a newborn's penis caused no pain (despite the screaming that inevitably resulted). It makes it a lot easier to understand how physicians could advocate mutilating infants given what they were taught back then about it all.

      By the way, if you don't believe me about this, here's the New York Times [nytimes.com] reporting on how major medical journals finally were acknowledging that infants experience pain... in 1987.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:09PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:09PM (#497089)

        Interesting, I hadn't heard that one. I found a review (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23548489) that claims the science was so settled in the 1950s on this topic that no one bothered talking about it anymore. In fact they started inflicting "not pain" on infants for diagnostic purposes (since they would still "react").

        • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:24PM (1 child)

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:24PM (#497093) Journal

          Thanks for the study link. It's one in a series of very strange medical traditions that continued into recent years. To this day, many older physicians don't bother even giving a local anesthetic to an infant before circumcision, despite the fact that safe practices for doing so have been known for decades, with extremely low risk for adverse effects. This practice is basically a holdover from the older belief that pain to infants doesn't matter... Except it does. (Subsequent studies have shown longer -term behavioral differences in infants who have been circumcised without any pain relief, as well as higher risks of complications afterwards, probably due to the shock the extreme pain sends their systems into.)

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 20 2017, @09:47PM (1 child)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday April 20 2017, @09:47PM (#497082)

      That's a good analysis, but remember that other western countries (mainly western Europe, plus places like Aus/NZ, Japan, and even Hispanic nations in Latin America, etc.) also have very similar medical systems with a lot of sharing between them, but the circumcision thing is mainly American. So why did America get stuck on it, but no one else did?

      • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:44PM

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:44PM (#497098) Journal

        It seems to be an English-language thing, likely because most of the doctors promoting the early theories spoke and wrote in English. The UK, Australia, etc. had high rates too. According to this [wikipedia.org], a 2005 poll in Australia had 58% of males saying they were circumcised. (There's a marked decline in circumcision for infants, but traditionally it was much higher.) And there are countries (e.g., South Korea) which have a high rate of circumcision solely due to contact and influence of Americans.

        Apparently the UK had a high rate of circumcision too until the late 1940s, when a combination of a prominent article pointing out the flawed science and the founding of the new National Health Service (which refused to include it in its list of covered services) caused its incidence to drop dramatically. Canada had the same trend, where rates were high until the 1970s or so, and then provinces started dropping coverage for the procedure (unless medically necessary), so its use has been declining there significantly too.

        Basically, it's mostly an English language thing within medicine. And apparently Americans keep doing it because insurance covers it.