It's suprising how many people say to me, "You're an Atheist? You must have no conscience about committing crime then." Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if we examine the population of our prisons, we see a very different picture:
In "The New Criminology", Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without religious training is about 1/10 of 1%. W. T. Root, professor of psychology at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers are absent from penitentiariers or nearly so.
During 10 years in Sing-Sing, those executed for murder were 65% Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1% non-religious. Steiner and Swancara surveyed Canadian prisons and found 1,294 Catholics, 435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and 1 Unitarian.
Dr. Christian, Superintendant of the NY State Reformatories, checked 22,000 prison inmates and found only 4 college graduates. In "Who's Who" 91% were college graduates, and he commented that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living" and that "crime is the offspring of superstition and ignorance."
Surveyed Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate religious, carefully herded by chaplains.
In Joliet, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617 Methodists and 0 non-religious.
Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in their state population. But in the prisons, there were 22 times as many Baptists as Jews, and 18 times as many Methodists as Jews. In Sing-Sing, there were 1,553 total inmates with 855 of them Catholics (over half), 518 Protestants, 177 Jews and 8 non-religious. There's a very interesting qualified statistic.
Read the rest of the article at:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/09/godlessness-rare-behind-bars.html
Do these statistics and the statistics in the full article surprise you?
How do you account for the fact that so few atheists are in prison if you believe that atheism leads to immorality?
Why are atheists, as a group, less likely to become criminals?
Conversely, why are religious people, as a group, more likely to become criminals?
Why do you suppose the 52% of Americans who belong to no church only represent 1% of the prison population?
If the Religious Right takes over, will the crime rate go up?
If a country becomes a theocracy, can we expect crime to soar?
Last, is it true that Mike182 read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica when he was only 15 because someone told him there were outstanding sex scenes in it, or is this just another silly RF rumor no one knows how it got started?
In "The New Criminology", Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without religious training is about 1/10 of 1%. W. T. Root, professor of psychology at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers are absent from penitentiariers or nearly so.
During 10 years in Sing-Sing, those executed for murder were 65% Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1% non-religious. Steiner and Swancara surveyed Canadian prisons and found 1,294 Catholics, 435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and 1 Unitarian.
Dr. Christian, Superintendant of the NY State Reformatories, checked 22,000 prison inmates and found only 4 college graduates. In "Who's Who" 91% were college graduates, and he commented that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living" and that "crime is the offspring of superstition and ignorance."
Surveyed Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate religious, carefully herded by chaplains.
In Joliet, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617 Methodists and 0 non-religious.
Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in their state population. But in the prisons, there were 22 times as many Baptists as Jews, and 18 times as many Methodists as Jews. In Sing-Sing, there were 1,553 total inmates with 855 of them Catholics (over half), 518 Protestants, 177 Jews and 8 non-religious. There's a very interesting qualified statistic.
Read the rest of the article at:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/09/godlessness-rare-behind-bars.html
Do these statistics and the statistics in the full article surprise you?
How do you account for the fact that so few atheists are in prison if you believe that atheism leads to immorality?
Why are atheists, as a group, less likely to become criminals?
Conversely, why are religious people, as a group, more likely to become criminals?
Why do you suppose the 52% of Americans who belong to no church only represent 1% of the prison population?
If the Religious Right takes over, will the crime rate go up?
If a country becomes a theocracy, can we expect crime to soar?
Last, is it true that Mike182 read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica when he was only 15 because someone told him there were outstanding sex scenes in it, or is this just another silly RF rumor no one knows how it got started?
)
