In 1822, a prominent South Carolina pastor named Richard Furman published his "Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States," in which he argued that immediate emancipation would be "extremely injurious to the community at large," and would interfere with the "religious improvement" of the people currently enslaved.
Horrified by the lack of Christian evangelism in India, Wilberforce used the 1793 renewal of the British East India Company's charter to propose the addition of clauses requiring the company to provide teachers and chaplains and to commit to the "religious improvement" of Indians.
To the poor they offered religious instruction and improvement in manners.
Opium, coca leaves, mescaline, and various other natural substances have been used for millennia in various cultures for therapeutic purposes, religious ceremonies, and improvement or modification of the physical and mental abilities.
"We didn't see any improvement of religious freedom," Suzan Johnson Cook, the ambassador at large for international religious freedom, said Monday when discussing Myanmar.
He also had done something toward giving it a better government, a useful navy, a start on religious reform and social improvement.
There was some ambiguity regarding the direction of cause and effect of this improvement – with religious resurgence and therefore virtuous actions leading to a better environment, and virtuous actions also including protecting animals and trees, so that relationships between sonam and the environment were reinforcing.
Improvements in religious freedom were informally tied to support for Vietnam's membership of the World Trade Organisation.
"The Purpose-Driven Life", a 40-day religious course of self-improvement, has sold 25m copies, more than any other non-fiction book except the Bible.Americans work harder than almost anyone else 300 hours a year more than Europeans.
Meanwhile French thinkers like Voltaire, Condorcet and Turgot converted the Christian idea of spiritual progress into a vision of rational human improvement unhindered by religious superstition.
Furthermore, interventions tailored to community needs, such as work with religious leaders to improve immunizations or nurse-led ethnically adapted cooking classes for diabetic patients, were also found to be positively correlated with improvement in the composite measure (rs=0.449, p<0.05).
