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It is always so easy to take correlations as causality by taking things at face value and making decisions about a multi-faceted phenomenon by basing it on things that are the most obvious about a culture or nation e.g. I observe that countries which are economically and politically backwards are made of a significant number of predominantly Buddhist ones, therefore Buddhism must be the cause of it all. Or terrorists are mainly if not all Muslims, hence elements within Islamic teachings cause terrorism. Simply because that that is the most immediately obvious about the culture that is being scrutinised. But if we do get down and serious, and start a serious academic research on the topic at hand, what we may find out is that there may be specific social ills within those particular cultures/nations that coveriate more with the issue of economic and human rights backwardness; factors which are not so easily observed or even realized by one who does not live or immerse long enough in that culture/nation, than these issues' coveriation with religion itself.

Furthermore, if correlation is going to be taken as casuality (which is one of the most fatal mistakes in research statistics), then are we going to say that Taiwan and Singapore are among the First World Nations but lag behind many European nations and the USA in terms of economic wellness and what some Westerners deem to be individual rights, because both Singapore (42.5%), (Singstat, 2005) and Taiwan (35.1%), (Wikipedia) have the Buddhism (which intermix with Taoism) as their most widely practised religion, which means half of population with the non-Buddhism concepts leads to the economic and democratic advances, AND the other half which comrises Buddhist ideologists account for the less developed aspect of their culture/nation? Conversely, Bhutan with its hugely Buddhist population has often been lauded as one of the countries with people of the highest happiness index, but are we simply going to jump in and say that because they are mostly Buddhist, Buddhism must be making people happier? Absolutely not, cos the fact that the higher percentage of Buddhist among Bhutanese is correlated with higher happiness index among Bhutanese does not equate Buddhism causing happiness among these people, or happiness making people Buddhist.

Moreover, when advancement in life is only measured only in terms of material wealth and individualist concepts, it may only provide a lop-sided view of the entirety of happiness. Happiness is meaured not only in terms of material wealth and good physical health, but also in terms of the level of mental well-being.

In addition, multiculturally speaking, what may be the ideally sufficient degree of democracy and liberty to some may not sound like a good definition of human rights for people of some cultures.