Congratulations atheists… you are more well-behaved than the rest of society. No, this isn’t a “pat you on the back” piece. But, I think it’s important for us to remember that we ARE moral people that know how to be good citizens without a divine babysitter telling us what’s right and wrong. And, there is evidence to show that this is correct.The sturdy they quote (Jensen, Vanderbuilt) sites the Paul "study" for it's factual basis (2005). That so called stud is totally disparaged by sociologists. Paul was not a social scientist and his alleged study was panned by critics as methodologically disastrous.In 2005, the Kripke Center released a detailed study called, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.” Long title, I know. But, what it said was very important and gets overlooked by many atheists. Keep in mind, the Kripke Center ISN’T secular and has no reason to promote a secular view. According to their own website, “The Kripke Center is dedicated to facilitating scholarly activity in the areas of religion and society. Special attention is given to promoting understanding between and among faith communities, including especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Kripke Center’s primary audience is the academic community, but its scholarship and services are available to all who seek them. The Center is named in honor of Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke.” The study had some amazing discoveries. They concluded:
Jensen himself says Paul's study was too simplistic:
That analysis, however, was based on scatterplotsHe does a multiple regression analysis. There's enough scholarly caution in the Jesen conclusion to argue that the original Atheist resource.com article's conclusion is totally unwarranted.
for eighteen “prosperous nations” and focused primarily
on the United States compared to Asecular@ nations. Because
there are numerous dimensions to religiosity and a variety of
alternative explanations of homicide rates, a more complex
analysis is required before more definitive conclusions can be
reached. This study attempts such an analysis for a much
larger sample of nations and tests Durkheim=s hypothesis that
religious passion as a variable characteristic of nations is a
positive correlate of homicide rates
There are obvious limitations to this analysis, and justOf cousre they don't quote that. There's more reason than that to suspect the data. The article on the Atheist Resource Blogs goes back to a tale of statistics not in the Jensen study but quotes a bogus table of statistics that was cmpied by Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Prisons released the following numbers in 1997 under the Freedom of Information Act. Atheists have been kicking around this research for a long time Its' proved by adherents.com to be bogus. The explanation on Adherent.com
as sociologists should not over-generalize about the positive
effects of religion based on prior research, negative
consequences have not been established conclusively. The data
are cross-sectional and the temporal links among the variables
studied have not been established. Moreover, the analysis is a
secondary analysis of data that have already been collected
which limits their applicability to more complex arguments.
Yet, this analysis is the first step towards a more
meaningful specification of the complex links between
religiosity and homicide rates at the ecological level using
nations as units of analysis. Some of the results are
remarkably consistent with Durkheim=s passion hypothesis about
religion and homicide and are contrary to over-generalizations
about religion as a barrier to crime. On the other hand,
relatively secular nations do not have lower homicide rates
than nations where people accept God and Heaven, but do not
embrace their malevolent counterparts, the Devil and Hell.
David Rice has written to us (23 October 2002) concerning the origin of the data in the table below: The data came from Denise Golumbaski, who was a Research Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The data was compiled from up-to-the-day figures on March 5th, 1997. (Note that as of the year 1999, Analyst Golumbaski is no longer working for the Federal Bureau of Prisons; I had telephoned Analyst Golumbaski to request the latest figures, and was told by another analyst that Golumbaski was no longer employed there.) The data was requested by Mr. Rod Swift, who passed it on to me for my web site. I later called the Federal Bureau of Prisons and confirmed that the data did in fact come from their database.This data was put up on Boyd Swift's website. strangely enough it changed. The atheists don't quote Golumbasky they quote from the Swift site so the facts are wrong. Read all about in my pages on Doxa. I can't put up a
This is the actual data Swift had to work wtih and Rice documents that fact, here it is:
19.908%
| Response | Number | % |
| Catholic | 29267 | 39.164% |
| Protestant | 26162 | 35.008% |
| None/Atheist/Unknown | 18,537 | |
| Muslim | 5435 | 7.273% |
| American Indian | 2408 | 3.222% |
| Nation | 1734 | 2.320% |
| Rasta | 1485 | 1.987% |
| Jewish | 1325 | 1.773% |
| Church of Christ | 1303 | 1.744% |
| Pentecostal | 1093 | 1.463% |
| Moorish | 1066 | 1.426% |
| Buddhist | 882 | 1.180% |
| Jehovah Witness | 665 | 0.890% |
| Adventist | 621 | 0.831% |
| Orthodox | 375 | 0.502% |
| Mormon | 298 | 0.399% |
| Scientology | 190 | 0.254% |
| Atheist | 156 | 0.209% |
| Hindu | 119 | 0.159% |
| Santeria | 117 | 0.157% |
| Sikh | 14 | 0.019% |
| Bahai | 9 | 0.012% |
| Krishna | 7 | 0.009 |
One attempt at this bogus atheist social sciences is a site by Boyd Swift. Swift, thought he would be a wrote the bureaus of prisons for stats, but unfortunately he doesn't know how to read a table.
| Response | Number | % |
| Catholic | 29267 | 39.164% |
| Protestant | 26162 | 35.008% |
| Muslim | 5435 | 7.273% |
| American Indian | 2408 | 3.222% |
| Nation | 1734 | 2.320% |
| Rasta | 1485 | 1.987% |
| Jewish | 1325 | 1.773% |
| Church of Christ | 1303 | 1.744% |
| Pentecostal | 1093 | 1.463% |
| Moorish | 1066 | 1.426% |
| Buddhist | 882 | 1.180% |
| Jehovah Witness | 665 | 0.890% |
| Adventist | 621 | 0.831% |
| Orthodox | 375 | 0.502% |
| Mormon | 298 | 0.399% |
| Scientology | 190 | 0.254% |
| Atheist | 156 | 0.209% |
| Hindu | 119 | 0.159% |
| Santeria | 117 | 0.157% |
| Sikh | 14 | 0.019% |
| Bahai | 9 | 0.012% |
| Krishna | 7 | 0.009% |
I have represented both talbes exactly as they appear on the adherents.com website.
Several interesting points. The original says "National of Islam," Swift's Version says "Nation" only. The Original puts Muslims at 5.837% While Swift's version puts them at 7.273%. Swift's has Mormons as seventh from bottom. The original doesn't have Mormons on it.
What's really interesting is the major difference for our puposes, the original includes "none/ahteist/unknown as third from the top. Swift puts them much further down. The Originals give the atheist category almost 20% while Swist tives it 0.2% or less.
Examine this table with the one above.
Swift's Table
On Swift's table there is no mention of atheist in the first five and atheist is listed fifth from the bottom. In that table atheist is 0.209%. Now here is the table sent by the Bureau of prisons to Rice, first five:,br>
In this table Atheist/unknown/none is third form top and has 19%! Fifth from the bottom on this version is not atheist but "Hindu." So the version sent by the Bureau of Prisons is significantly different than the version put up by Swift.
It seems Swift misrepresented the data.
So in other words, the actual number of atheists is about a quarter as high as the Christians. It's not this tiny 0.something percent, it's actually pretty high.
It's pretty clear he fabricated the data. These mistakes are too far off to be merely mistakes in recording.
Swist goes on to expalin how the disproportionate number of atheists in prison from the general population means they are so far better behaved than Christians.
Now, let's just deal with the nasty Christian types, no? "Judeo-Christian Total 62594 83.761% (of the 74731 total responses) Total Known Responses 74731 Not unexpected as a result. Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%)."
Of course he's distorting these figures too because it's not 8% certianly not 16%. He's including people who believe in God but don't like organized religion as well as agnostics as atheists. He's also dealing with his flase figures. The actual figure is 20% atheists in prison and 3% in society. So what does this tell us? Atheist are a lot less well behaved.
adherents.com
answers Swift's page directly:
One atheist web page (http://holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm) presented statistics stating that 0.209% of federal prisoners (in 1997) stated "atheist" as their religious preference. This site said that this is far less than the 8 to 16% of the American population that are atheists.Atheists play a little game where they refuse to accept the fac thtat there are distinctions between really have a devotion to a faith and merely having a passing identification. They play this game so they can say that all the bad things of history are done by Christians and Christians can't say "O but they weren't real Christians." Yet real sociologists (which is more than just a matter of dedication but of real credentials) say that there is a valid distinction and not all people who say "I am a Christian" are really examples of dedication to that faith. The refusal to account for depth of commitment is a real flaw in Swist's thinking and this is exactly what adherents.com points out:
The atheist site, however, provided no source for the notion that "8 to 16%" of Americans are atheists. This statistic is completely without support from the available data. Gallup polls which include questions about religion have consistently shown that between 93 and 96% of Americans say that they believe in God. Presumably atheist writers would not suggest that up to half of their claimed "atheists" believe in God. The actual proportion of atheists in the United States is about 0.5% (half of one percent). This is the figure obtained from the largest survey of religious preference ever conducted: the National Survey of Religious Identification (Kosmin, 1990), which polled 113,000 people. The religious preference questions were part of questioning completely unrelated to religious preference (consumer preferences, entertainment, etc.), so the frequent retort of atheists that their numbers don't like to admit to atheism, and hence are undercounted, is unlikely.
Thus, some commentators on one side have claimed that being religious is associated with incarceration. This is based only on religious preference statistics. American sociologists are well aware that nearly all Americans profess a religious preference. But there is a major difference between those who are actually religious affiliated, that is, members of a congregation (approx. 45 to 65% of the population, varying by region), and those who merely profess a preference, likely the name of the denomination that their parents of grandparents were a part of. (One of the best discussions of this phenomenon can be found in The Churching of America, 1776-1990, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark; New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.)
On that same page adherents.com quotes Bureau of Justice Statistics (National Census of the Jail Population 12/31/95):
72% affirm Christianity
54% actually declare themselves religious
Only 33% actually pracitce their faith (by attending chruch).
Sociologists would laugh themselves silly over the simplistic nature of Swift's thinking. It's just not enough to assume from raw data on the afflictions of prision population that some belief system leads to crime. From that same adherents.com page:
Thus, some commentators on one side have claimed that being religious is associated with incarceration. This is based only on religious preference statistics. American sociologists are well aware that nearly all Americans profess a religious preference. But there is a major difference between those who are actually religious affiliated, that is, members of a congregation (approx. 45 to 65% of the population, varying by region), and those who merely profess a preference, likely the name of the denomination that their parents of grandparents were a part of. (One of the best discussions of this phenomenon can be found in The Churching of America, 1776-1990, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark; New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.)
As that same article points out someone on a survey answering "Im a Methodist" is virtually meaningless, not sociologically it is meaningless, becuase that person may be just remembering the affliction of the family or the grandparents or parents, not his own actual feelings. A more reliable indication is enrollment on chruch rolls. Even more reliable than that is chruch attendance.
What this guy has done on the Atheist resource Blog is to recognize the need for complex data analysis, pretend like he has it in quoting the Jensen study, but instead of quoting the conclusion which is doubtful about proving anything he substitutes (bait and switch) the bogus data. Here we have before our eyes a very sloppy attempt at leisure De main a bit and switch in which he sticks in the propaganda with te phony data in such a way (although badly done) as to give the impression that it's in sink with the study he sites.
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