Undercurrent

It seems like this completely kills Stark's conclusion. If the causes of atheism and criminality were the same, one would expect them to be directly correlated with each other.

Stark's result, and this one, can both easily be explained by levels of education, especially in the natural sciences. People with higher levels of education have a higher chance of being atheists, are predominantly male (at least in natural sciences and engineering) explaining Stark's observation, and tend not to come from situations like poverty and abusive households that lead to crime (explaining ps418's cite's observations.)

Unfortunately, the obvious interpretations don't sufficiently tickle the ears of the religious, who'd much rather hear than atheism is near-as-damn-it a mental illness, not a product of education.

m.

scigirl

I've heard that statistic before, and I wonder. . . how much of that is due to people converting in prison? I imagine that the idea of "washing away of sins" and an eternal bliss is a big comfort to people who are in jail, for say, murdering someone.

scigirl the eternal skeptic

Gurdur

I've known of at least six specific examples of people suddenly becoming "born-again Christians" when sent off to jail; I always regarded the tactic as a simple manipulative one.

DamagedGoods

Wow, that just screams bias. Such a statement would almost be enough to make me discard the entire paper out-of-hand, because it's written by someone who has already made up their mind that "not being religious" is something only impulsive (defective?) people do without thinking about it. As though we didn't reason our way to not being religious, it's just that we just have adult onset ADHD and can't stay focused long enough to be quite as spiritual as all those 'normal' people.
If Prof. Stark had posited a connection between supposedly religious people that couldn't live up to their professed religion and those that can't abide by the rules of civilized behavior, I would be inclined to agree. In one case, their impulsive nature might cause them to violate religous codes, and in the other they're violating civil codes.

But it appears that wasn't his point. I can't read the full paper, so I don't know for sure.

*** Edited to add sarcasm ***

ps418

The data on religious affiliation is probably collected upon entrance to the prison system, before convicts have had a chance to be exposed to much prison religiosity.

Cretinist

I'm not so sure about the validity of those statistics. When I first came across the figures at Adrian Barnett's site, I tried my best to locate the data on a government website. Try as I might, I couldn't find a survey even remotely similar to this.

This was about a year ago. Reading this post yesterday caused me to try my search again. This time the search brought up an anti-atheist site discussing the validity of those statistics.

http://www.errantskeptics.org/Ancient_Statistics.htm

Also I found huge webpage about these statistics at adherents.com.

Jamie_L

There is a difference between being apathetic towards religion (i.e. not giving a damn) and being thoughtfully non-religious (atheist, agnostic, etc.) The former could constitue the kind of people the study appears to be talking about - people who effectively have "no religion" because they just don't think about it. They don't care. They are more interested in living their daily lives from moment to moment than worrying about philosophical questions like "where did this all come from?" and "what happens when we die?" The latter group, however, consists of people who have thought about these questions and concluded that the usual religious answers to such things are simply unfounded in reality.

I personally believe that many criminals are irreligious in the first sense. They aren't atheists, and if asked might even say they believe in God, just because someone once told them there was a god and they never bothered to question it. But they aren't religious in any meaningful way. However, drawing some connection between this type of irreligiousness and critical/skeptical atheism is just plain erroneous. IMO.

Jamie

sourdough

imo it makes more sense for atheists to be honest ,moral,
law abiding citizens b/c we know we only have one life to live
and wasting my life being locked up in the slammer is not
exactly my idea of enjoyment,
theists have their Haven to look forward to,no matter how bad
they are,they can always repent,accept Jebus,be forgiven and halleluja,saved.

Taffsadar

Well the whole "study is ruined if you look at Sweden (you gotta love Swedes they can ruin any creationist "study" by just being). No other country got a populance with such and enormous amount of insurances, everything is insuranced around here. The people of Sweden isn't religious either (under 10%) so nonreligious risk takers doesn't apply. The thing about nonreligious people being criminals doesn't work either as our crime rates are way lower than the US ones (and our unemployment rate is only 2% lower so you can't blame unemployment either). The only thing that still applies is that the low educated people are the most religious ones .

So by comparing Sweden to USA can we assume that religion causes crime, unemployment, low education and teenage pregnancies . So all hail Sweden :notworthy

scombrid

This guy is obviously a crank with religious motives. Reading this I'm wondering why he didn't just follow it with Pascal's Wager. Irreligiousness is only shortsighted if his version of The Truth(tm) happens to be correct. That religious belief is automatically risk averse is a large and unexceptable assumtion on his part.

As has already been mentioned, the assymetry in investment in the offspring has likely led to the evolution of different social behavior patterns in males and females. Females are more in need of a social network in order successfully raise offspring, especially if the male deserts. The male is less likely to suffer the fate of not passing his genes if he deserts and may even increase his relative fitness through promiscuity. All this would simply lead to females being more likely to accept the cultural norms in order to maintain their social network and males may be slightly more inclined to independence.