Russell Coker wrote:
While some of the theories about memes are a bit extreme, the general concepts hold water. If 25% of the population consistently makes some claim then people who hear that will tend to think that it has some merit. 25% is enough that almost everyone in the US will have a friend of a friend who's an evangelical and most people will have a friend or relative who is.
I think you're talking about the Overton window, there.
If you want to pick on a particular nation-state for being religious, all you gotta do is pull up this handy graph, and work your way up from the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart–Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world
The second lowest entry in the English speaking section of that graph is the US. The only worse one is Ireland.
OK, but WHY are you focusing solely on the anglophone community?
When politicians want to cut medicare I don't blame Ireland, but I think that the US deserves some of the blame.
OK, but what has that to do with religion? If your actual agenda is to complain about negative US influence on Australian culture and policymaking, why don't you say that, rather than opening with unsubtantiated claims about biblical literacy in the US cohort? :-) It seems to me that you've found some people being dickheads, and they're saying "god wants us to do this!", and you think "if only there were no gods, there'd be no dickheads". But, like, that's just their excuse — the underlying reason is usually irreligious, e.g. two groups both want the same bit of arable land or trade route, and they can't BOTH have it. In the case of universal healthcare, the underlying reason is pretty obviously that the capitalists think it's cheaper to maintain a police caste to keep the lumpenproletariat under control when their ol' Mums get sick, than it is to just keep everybody healthy in the first place. (I think they're wrong, but for a partial counterargument start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_population)