Re: Deep River/Deep Sleep [was Boy Genius or Craft Idiot?]

From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 14:54:37 MDT

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    From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>

    > Olga Bourlin wrote:
    > >
    > > It's an interesting aside is that people who are unchurched (or
    > > unsynaguogued or unmosqued) are way under-represented in jails. It
    > > seems those free from religion are better citizens.
    >
    > Couldn't google... got any keywords for this? I'm interested.

    Not claiming these would all pass academic muster, but for what they're worth ...

    "Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%).":

    http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm

    "This was written a few years back, but I would guess the percentages are
    probably still good.":

    http://www.cs.umass.edu/~danilche/texts/crime_and_religion.txt

    "In terms of property crimes and violent crimes, American prisons are filled with religious people, especially Christians and Moslems. On the other hand, atheists very rarely end up in prison and statistically, for as long as data have been collected, atheists have been proportionally under-represented in prison populations.":

    http://se1.com/ft/ftorg/nlscs/ARTICLES/TS206M.html

    From: Gordon Stein, Ph.D., An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, USA, 1980, p. 244.:

    http://www.bobkwebsite.com/prisoninmaterlgn.html

    "Yet the percentage incidence of homicides and other crimes in the God-fearing U.S. is much higher than in the heavily secularized Western countries. And a corresponding disparity exists between the respective percentages of the prison populations in these societies.":

    http://www.infidels.org/~jlowder/atheism/overview.html

    Hope these will do for a start. I would like to see more studies done. Even if it turned out that the percentage of religious v. nonreligious prisoners was *the same* - that in itself would be interesting, for it would suggest that religiosity has no bearing on a person's criminal predilections. Of course, in some countries the statistics on the nonreligious would be difficult to gather, as it may be an insult to Allah (or other avenging alleged spiritual force of choice) for infidels to exist ("protective coloration to the rescue!"). Throughout history, many good freethinkers were either burned alive or beheaded. (It's a wonder a few nonreligious genes survived ... and lived to tell about it! he he he)

    Olga

    http://www.cs.umass.edu/~danilche/texts/crime_and_religion.txt

     

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