Religion can be bad for you 2

I posted an article earlier (5 posts down) about a study that shows that religious societies suffer more from problems like murder, abortion, suicide, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases than secular societies. Here's an interesting comment from castrovalva:

"It would probably be more accurate to say that religious belief has done nothing in the United States to arrest or prevent these problems, given that any number of socio-economic conditions that are not present in other countries could be more important as causal factors. In either case, religion does not effectively play the role of enforcing collective moral codes that Durkheim saw it performing (though I always felt that advocating religion on social rather than spiritual grounds was putting the cart before the horse). However, that still leaves the more interesting question of the role religion has played in producing the socio-economic conditions I mentioned; for instance, by stressing individual salvation over collective responsibility."

INDIVIDUAL salvation over collective responsibility: that seems to me to nail the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Yet does that make Democrats more secular? Hardly. Less selfish? Probably. Though a Republican would spin selfish into something more like self-reliance.
But it's the cult of self-reliance that leads to taking no responsibility for the larger whole: a CEO who pays himself 500 times more than the average guy who works for him has left the realm of collective responsibility for some bizarre notion of god-like entitlement, in which he does not compare himself to those for whom he bears responsibility, but only to his fellow CEOs, the other gods on an Olympus of entitlement.
I think this sharing of entitlement starts not only at home, but at the Ivy League universities, where students enter into their first and defining realm of privilege. If our elite is selfishly irresponsible, where do they get it from? My theory: the universities they go to. That's where the virus infects them.