This letter will likely be my only contribution to the opinion page creation-evolution debate. I am writing not to persuade the reader to one side or the other, but simply to rebut some of the more outlandish claims Sam Arnold made in his recent categorical dismissal of religion.

Arnold tells the reader to examine the statistics on religion and charitable donations—so I did. Interestingly, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University found that religious people are 25 percent more likely to give their money to different causes and 23 percent more likely to give their time.

It might be argued that religious Americans give predominantly to religious charities, skewing the statistics; however, the Hoover Institution also found that religious people are 10 percent more likely to donate to and 21 percent more likely to volunteer for nonreligious efforts. Other studies have reached similar conclusions.

The National Survey of Giving, Volunteering, and Participating found that Canadians who regularly attend worship services are more likely to volunteer for both religious and nonreligious purposes than those who rarely or never attend.

Obviously, I’m not trying to suggest that nonreligious people do not contribute to their communities. I just wish to dispel the baseless accusation that, as Arnold puts it, the religious populace has no morality outside of the “primal sky-god-punishes-bad-people mythology.”

On a slightly different note, it seems to me that if Arnold were particularly concerned with fostering “honest inquiry, peaceful cooperation, empathy, science and progress,” he would not so dismissively refer to Jesus of Nazareth as a zombie demigod.

Perhaps he and I have been reading different Bibles. However, if Arnold does indeed own a Bible wherein Jesus and the disciples wander the countryside feeding off of the five thousand instead of simply feeding them, hopefully he will lend me his copy. I’m sure it’s a riveting read.

John Young is a junior majoring in history and political science.