So I've seen a couple of videos recently from some popular YouTube atheists talking about why Islam is a terrible religion. And I have to say, I'm kind of disappointed by their arguments... The one that stuck out the most to me was when they took two maps and basically said "Here, behold the overlap between countries where Islam is the major religion and the countries where sexual inequality is at its highest. Clearly Islam is bad. Case closed."

The problem is that I can go to WDI and find a map that displays average level of income per country and lay it on top of the countries that have the highest sexual inequality... and get much more overlap. Lets not forget, however, that just laying maps over each other, or laying graphs over each other is just simply not good evidence for anything at all. Have you ever taken a stroll through the countless Reddit posts correlating ridiculous things like cheese consumption vs suicide rates in men, and just other crazy things?

Here is another somewhat thought... Apparently people think that religion has a significant impact on number of babies had per woman. I simply do not agree with this thought... at all. If you go to gapminder.org and play around with their data tools, you can create a bubble graph that shows babies per woman vs Human Development Index. You can then change the color of the bubbles to major religions in each country and see for yourself that there is no correlation between religion and babies per woman...

Now this does not mean that I don't think that religion doesn't have significant impact in any instance. I'm just not convinced that religion is the main driving factor in these two specific topics.

Just my thoughts, what do you think?

Links:
World by income, WDI: http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/site-content/wdi/maps/2017/world-by-income-wdi-2017.pdf

ilga.org inequality world map: https://ilga.org/downloads/2017/ILGA_WorldMap_ENGLISH_Overview_2017.pdf