Thanks to Abigail Goldman of the Las Vegas Sun
The maps have hit all over the web today, and the odds on favorite seems to be Lust. And the bloody red finger of fate, showing that the most lustful of counties in our country, seem to be deep in the heart of what some are calling Jesusland.
I invite you to take a look at Abigail’s article. It not only breaks down Nevada by county in her article, and it directs you to the nice folks who made the map, it also has the rights to use the maps that KSU came up with, as well as their criteria that they used to actually generate the maps.
Plus, Abigail’s has two cute Flash slide shows, and it would be nice to kick her a bone because I doubt everyone is going to do more than look at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and The Atlantic’s blurb on the Lust map.
What I find interesting, more than the Lust map, is Envy. It paints an interesting picture, and then to round it out, check out the Pride map–which was less a look at how prideful folks were, as an aggregate of all the other sins, and the picture it paints.
I take no pleasure in recognizing that we seem to have some problems–and that areas of the country that seem most to be doing poorly, are often areas that a lot of ostensibly pious and vocally vociferous folks tell it on the mountain. I don’t exactly think that we are seeing a causal relationship. Correlation does not imply causation. But, it does put some things into perhaps a different light.
Folks who tell us how drenched in sin we are as a nation, it can be argued see that sin all around them. They can feel it steep their shores and hills, and they can genuinely feel that pain around them. Like most folks, it isn’t a hard leap to think that because you see so much pain and heartache around you, that you assume that it’s just like that all around the nation. They can see poverty, they can see the divides that separate folks, and see quite plainly the violence that can erupt. And, since we are fallible human critters, they assume that since it happens around their doorsteps, that the entire nation is steeped in the same problems.
While I can’t exactly celebrate this study, I hope that folks take the time to take a look at it–not to say that the ostensibly pious cause these problems, or that there is any irony to their claims to morality, but instead to see the world that they are facing, and how it might differ from that of that “other” America. I think that this set of maps is a great tool to help understand how regions see things differently, and how different are the problems that they face.
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