June 18, 2010 12:45pm by swood | 
Fear of the devil is holding up the census in India as groups of religious believers refuse to participate for fear of being associated with an imaginary evil force.
The fear of the ‘Beast’ or the Devil in the Christian-dominated state of Mizoram has caused almost 1,000 families to refuse to enroll their names in the National Population Register (NPR) taken up along with the Census 2011 here from May 15.
The dread stems from Chapter 13 Verse 17 of the Book of Revelations in the Bible which says “… and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the Beast or the number of his name.”
The problem has stemmed from the Unique Identification Authority of India stipulating that none one could buy or sell property without the Unique ID card.
According to adherents of the belief, since buying or selling of property made one a follower of the Beast, one having the UID card, which authorised property transactions, automatically made one a follower of the Devil.
Their local church authority tried in vain to calm fears by saying that the believers didn’t need to fear the imaginary Boogie Man because their imaginary Sky Pixie God was stronger than the Boogie Man. How they could possibly know or verify this is anybody’s guess. Apparently the masses feel the same way because they aren’t buying it.
Meanwhile, the rational, educated people in India are shaking their heads.
Source: SIFY News
I’m not sure I see the link: America has a serious number of what I would call, ummm, religious nut jobs. Creationists are just the tip of the iceberg, and they’re quite well represented in the halls of congress.
My point? America is the most powerful, richest country in the time. So, while Religion may be a drag on something, somewhere, it’s not on society as a whole. At least, not on American society.
I’d like to say it’s education that’s the problem here, but America doesn’t exactly light up the boards on achievement levels, world wide either, does it? Besides, countries like Ireland and Poland rank high, scholastically, and they are traditionally known as devout Christian nations.
In fact, literacy rates in the state you mentioned are at 95%, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizoram#Education
(India as a whole has a literacy rate of 66% according to wikipedia)
So what is it? Well, lets look at the numbers: The report (I googled it, you left this part out) said that 1305 families refused to participate for this reason. Let’s assume an average of 5 people in a family, that would be 6,525 people. The population of the state is listed as 888,573 (again, according to wikipedia)
Ok, so if I divide by…then multiple by….I get a percentage of….0.73% OR, if we subtract from 100, we get a *participation* rate of 99.27%
Maybe it’s just me, but that’s hardly what I’d call a “dragging down” of modern society.
Just as a matter of interest, would you be able to determine how many refused to participate in the census because they told the census worker to “get off my lawn sonny”.
Why do I ask? It’s well known that front lawns have, and continue to drag down modern society. That’s all.