God Is Good For You

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The Australia’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan took several months leave to write a book why God is good for you and one of its several launches took place at The Sydney Jewish Museum.

Jeremy Jones and Greg Sheridan

Co-hosted by the museum and The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, the launch was highlighted by a conversation between AIJAC’s Jeremy Jones and Sheridan.

The large crowd attended the event at the museum’s education centre learned Greg Sheridan had a relationship going back almost 40 years with Jeremy Jones and AIJAC’s executive director Dr Colin Rubenstein.

The religious journalist said his book is pro Catholic, Sikh and Jewish religions saying that as a Catholic on the last two “I take inspirations from both”.

He explained that his wife is a Sikh.

Sheridan said that he has visited writers festivals which featured hundreds of books with not a single one in favour of God.

He said: “No-one seemed to be in favour of God or religious traditions.”

He told me the audience: “The knowledge of God is passing out of our culture Not only is our culture is rejecting religious belief  but it didn’t know what it was rejecting any more

In universities and high schools students are being deprived of any knowledge of their own inheritance…and so much of our civilisation inheritance is based on our religious inheritance.”

Sheridan took several months including one to immerse in the Hebrew bible, a month in the medieval history and a month in the classic arguments of the existence of God.

Jones asked him about a study which revealed that those who are religious broadly contribute to society.

He added  what would be the consequences for Australia and the West if belief in God or affiliation with religions now disappeared from the scene or was greatly diminished

The journalist responded: “Contemporary belief culture is very down on traditional religions associated with the West. Yet the evidence is that religion have an overwhelmingly positive social outcome.

There is an enormous amount of American social research which shows that religious people are more philanthropic, more generous, more likely to join community groups, more socially active…and also happier.”

The studies also revealed that the happiest people are those who believe in God, attend a church or temple service once week.

He quoted sociologist Charles Murray who said ‘When a community loses its religious belief it loses the essential glue that holds it together’.

In researching for the book, Sheridan learned that politicians tend to be more religious than those who they represent.

He believes that Humanity never loses God altogether adding that in Asia religions plays a major part in most communities unlike in the West although he states the America is more religious than Australia and New Zealand.

He added: “We are becoming a very irreligious society. There is a large growing cohort of atheists and religious people tend to be older.

A culture without God is completely different from what we have had before .

We lose the sense of human dignity. if there is no God and human beings will just be an outcrop of the biosphere.

Can the society which lacks transcendent belief sustain itself?”