Hermit's Ideological Commetments Determine Truth Content for Him

I have proven that the Boyd Swift data on Christians being more likely to go to prison are wrong. He denies changing the numbers and I said I would not accuse him until I have positive proof, but someone did. Either he did or the guy who sent him the data did. It could be that the guys who sent the data to adherents did, but I don't see what their motive would be. Neither the Bearu of prisons nor Adherents.com have a motive, but an atheist would.



the real data sent to Adherents.com

Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
None/Atheist/Unknown 18,537
Muslim

the data sent to Swift


Mormon 298 0.399%
Scientology 190 0.254%
Atheist 156 0.209%
Hindu


So the actual letter sent by Bureau of prisons to adherents.com shows a totally different set of numbers. the entries above and below the column with atheists in it are different and the numbers of atheists are totally different.

see thew full tables here if you are willing to actually look at a link which most athesits are not.


Hermit continues to insist that there's nothing fishy here. The two tables are substantially different but they supposed to be the same table. Either Swift fabricated, the Adherent's guys fabricated, or the Bureau of prisons fabricated. Why that would be who can say. But Hermits wants me to automatically assume it could not be atheists, but he can't give me a reason to assume that.


Hermit seems to have not even a theoretical problem with an atheist fabricating numbers, he seems to think this is trivial and not obvious.

Hermit demonstrates his true biases:

Adherents.com appears to have erroneously added together a large number of no-responses to the non-theist category.

But that doesn't make any sense since they are saying their stats come from the original source and that's the letter sent them. You could only say that if you assume the letter sent Swift is true stats, but how do we know that? Apparently he's just assuming it becuase it's something an atheist says. It confirms his biases.

And I have to wonder about the ideological biases at work at adherents when they cite numbers from the loony conspiracy theorists at World Net Daily and push the bogus idea that gays are more likely to be pedophiles...http://www.adherents.com/misc/adh_prison.html#dichotomy

So there it really comes out, his true reason is that he has an ideological motive for automatically accepting that Swift is right and denying what Adherent's says.

here's what the link he quotes says:

One problem faced by some religious writers as well as some atheist writers who have tried to equate religious belief or atheism with criminal behavior (and probably a major reason why there is no empirical data to support either contention) is that a person's philosophical position on this one point is not the major factor in determining criminal behavior. Factors such as level of income, employment/non-employment, level of education, race, geographical region, age, sex, etc. are all tracked by the government and other organizations. All of these characteristics correlate more readily to criminal behavior. (GLBT status, on the other hand, has not been shown to correlate generally to incarceration rate, although it is highly correlated with pedophilia. According to gay researchers Karla Jay and Allen Young, 73 percent of the gay men they report having engaged in sex with boys 16 to 19 years of age or younger; 86 percent of convicted child molesters who molested boys describe themselves as homosexual or bisexual. See also: World Net Daily article; More)

the article that articles quotes says:

Child molestation and pedophilia occur far more commonly among homosexuals than among heterosexuals on a per capita basis, according to a new study.
"Overwhelming evidence supports the belief that homosexuality is a sexual deviancy often accompanied by disorders that have dire consequences for our culture," wrote Steve Baldwin in, "Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement," soon to be published by the Regent University Law Review.

That's looks to me like some pretty right-wing oriented stuff, but what' Hermit is saying is that the extent to which he's willing to believe who fabricated the stats depends upon who supports gay rights and who doesn't. His positron on the issue is not "yes it's bad if the atheist fabricated" but rather we should believe he didn't on the principle that we hate right wingers and we support gay rights. I content that has noting do with the prison statistics and he's showing how bigoted his thinking is that everything he looks is colored by his ideological perspective so that he doesn't care what is true. the Idea that 'well they quoted one bad article so we can trust anything they say" is pretty stupid.

But any way you look at these numbers though it's clear that being an atheist doesn't correlate with a greater likelihood of being in prison; so the oft heard Christian charge that being atheist leaves one with no reason to not rob and murder people is plainly untrue...which was Swift's whole point to begin with.

Look at what he's not even willing to think about:

(1) that no sociologist would agree to understanding religious belief as a cause of crime

(2) totally ignores the parole argument which kill sthe entire arguemnt point blank before it ever get's started.

(3) totally ignores the issue that a chnck of raw data is not a study and tells us nothing.

(4) expecting all the stats to line up accruatly is idiotic, so you can't expect 3% of prisioners to be atheist on the assumption that 3% of society is atheist.

(5) he's basing his incredulity about the fabrication fo statistics on the good that it his side to not believe they could do wrong rather than concern with what really happened or what's really the truth.

(6) totally misses the poin that under rating the percentage of atheists by 25% or so completely destroys the original argument.
As usual when an atheist tries to counter the lies and slander of Christians he gets accused of being a liar himself.


(7) He ignores the other arguments made on Adherent.com such as this:

There is no sociologically valid basis for comparing "theists to nontheists" with regards to incarceration rates (or any other sociological measure) because "theists" do not constitute an identifiable social group. The fact that non-practicing (functionally nonreligious) people are highly over-represented among prisoners is a separate issue, apart from questions relating to belief and philosophical position. To consider incarceration rates of "atheists" vs. "theists" is like comparing Hispanics to non-Hispanics. While it may be possible to group figures that way, it doesn't make a lot of sense to do so. Non-Hispanics are better broken down into Asians, African-Americans and Whites (if one doesn't further break them down by other factors such as age, education, etc.) Likewise, it makes no sense to group all non-atheists together, as if Amish

, Muslims, Quakers, Baha'is, Hindus, Presbyterians, Orthodox Jews, Baptists, Deists, Lutherans, Unitarians, Rastafarians, Wiccans, etc., all exhibited similar behavior. Obviously some of these groups exhibit relatively little criminal behavior, while others would exhibit relatively more criminal behavior. Certain crimes are more prevalent among certain groups. 85% of Americans cite a specific religious affiliation. So if you combine figures for people of all religious affiliations you get essentially the same figure that you would get for the whole U.S. population. The figure would only be different if essentially all religious groups were skewed in one direction, which they are not.

Adherents used to get a lot of respect from atheists when they just showed the percentages of different groups and summarized Zuckerman's findings. Now they have actually published some articles showing that Zuerman's stats are not reliable and also attached this stupid prison argument they are being treated like scum by atheists. More proof hate group atheism can't think and only reacts in knee jerk fashion to whatever supports its ideology.