Generally speaking, research increasingly indicates that Atheists show more positive traits/rates than Believers.
A. Earlier prisoner research: Atheists not more inclined to be moral misfits or more Likely to be incarcerated than Believers
(Posted by: steve benson, Date: February 11, 2015 04:21PM)
For theists here who think that atheism makes one an immoral misfit might want to take a look in the mirror. America's prison population is represented by a population of believers that is disproportionately larger than that shared by atheists:
"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 New York 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
"Surveyed Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate religious, carefully herded by chaplins.
"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 eight non-religious.
"Steiner first surveyed 27 states and found 19,400 Christians, 5,000 with no preference and only three Agnostics (one each in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Illinois). A later, more complete survey found 60,605 Christians, 5,000 Jews, 131 Pagans, 4,000 no preference, and only three Agnostics.
"In one 29-state survey, Steiner found 15 unbelievers, Spirtualists, Theosophists, Deists, Pantheists and 1 Agnostic among nearly 83,000 inmates. Calling all 15 'anti-christians' made it one half person to each state. Elmira reformatory overshadowed all, with nearly 31,000 inmates, including 15,694 Catholics (half), and 10,968 Protestants, 4,000 Jews, 325 refusing to answer, and 0 unbelievers.In the East, over 64% of inmates are Catholics. In the national prison population they average 50%. A national census found Catholics 15%. They count from the diaper up. Hardly 12% are old enough to commit a crime. Half of these are women. That leaves an adult Catholic population of 6% supplying 50% of the prison population.
"Liverpool, England produces thr3% as many young criminals as Birmingham, a larger city, 28% coming from Catholic schools.
(For the full article, which also includes a percentage breakdown of prison inmates determined by believer vs. non-believer catgory, see: "Atheists In Prison: 1997 Federal Bureau of Prisons Statistics" and :miscellaneous Prison Statistics," at:
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Percentage_of_atheists)
Put that in your sacrament cup and swallow it.
B. Later prisoner research: Atheist inmate populations significantly smaller than expected
(Posted by: steve benson, Date: February 12, 2015 12:23AM)
Oh, ye theists of too much faith. Here are some updated numbers:
"What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists? It’s a Lot Smaller Than We Ever Imagined"
by Hemant Mehta
16 July 2013
"Earlier this month, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Bureau of Prisons asking them about the religious makeup of prisoners. Over the weekend, to my surprise, I received a response. Not only did they have the information, they gave me a faith-by-faith breakdown:
"So ... what do we learn from that information?
"Of the prisoners willing to give their religious affiliations (and that’s an important caveat), atheists make up 0.07% of the prison population.
"Not 1%.
"Not even the 0.2% we’ve been using for so long.
"Atheists constitute an even smaller percentage of the prison population than we ever imagined. (That includes prisoners whose affiliations were unknown. . . .)
"In addition to that, Protestants make up 28.7% of the prison population; Catholics, 24%; Muslims, 5.5%; American Indians, 3.1%. I’ve put together a bare-bones spreadsheet with these numbers here--feel free to do with that what you will.
"Keep in mind that these numbers only cover prisoners who self-reported their religious identification. They don’t represent all prisoners in the system. We will likely never have perfect numbers . . . .
"We’re also only talking about prisoners in the federal prison system--about 218,000 people--not all prisoners in America.
"Prisoners can change religious affiliations, too. We don’t know if these numbers represent what they believed when they committed their crime(s) or what they believed after they went through some personal transformation.
"Finally, it’s also important to note that 17% of prisoners reported no religious preference. They’re not necessarily atheists and may even believe in a higher power. We really don’t know. 3% were 'Other' and 3.44% were 'Unknown.' We can’t assume these people are atheists or Christian or anything else. However, if you combined the Atheist/No Religious Preference groups and lumped them together as 'Nones,' as some sociologists do, you’d get 17% of the prison population… I’m not sure that tells you anything useful, though, because of the murkiness of the labels. . . .
"Here’s another question worth asking: How does the prisoner data compare to the religious makeup of the general population? In other words, are atheists over-presented or under-represented in prison?
"If you look at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (PDF), you’ll see that self-described atheists make up 1.6% of the population. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (PDF) puts atheists at 0.7% of the population. (If those numbers seem awfully low to you, make sure you’re not confusing atheists with the ever-rising percentage of 'Nones.')
"In both cases, atheists are *very* under-represented in prison and that’s heartening to see. (The proportion of Catholics in prison is about on par with their makeup in the general population, Muslims are over-represented in prison, and Protestants appear to be under-represented though you really have to look at individual denominations to get a clearer picture of what’s happening.)
"Given the data we have, and acknowledging its limits, self-professed atheists constitute an even smaller percentage of prisoners than we ever thought."
("What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists? It’s a Lot Smaller Than We Ever Imagined," by Hemant Mehta, 16 July 2013, at:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/07/16/what-percentage-of-prisoners-are-atheists-its-a-lot-smaller-than-we-ever-imagined/)
C. Recent data (including from Xtian polling): Atheists have stronger family values and higher levels of tolerance, conscientiousness, law-abidingness, liberalism. and education--plus lower levels of divorce, crime, prejudice and suggestibility--than evangelical Xtians
(Posted by: steve benson Date: February 12, 2015 01:06AM )
"Atheists Have Stronger Family Values Than Evangelical Christians"
by Piper Hoffman
4 September 2013
"The family that prays together may be less likely to stay together. Research shows that the folks trying hardest to force their religious beliefs on other people, Evangelical Christians, are more likely to divorce than those with no religion at all.
"Atheists have the lowest divorce rate when compared to religious groups (except Catholics and Lutherans, with whom they are tied). This is according to a Christian polling company (which confusingly refers to evangelicals as 'non-denominational'). The company, The Barna Group, published the numbers in 1999. While many news outlets reported on the study, their links to it are all dead, suggesting that Barna pulled the study off its site. Still available on the website is a 2008 study that, not surprisingly, came to different conclusions.
"The original findings about divorce among non-believers are borne out by a 2009 comparison of geographical regions by the U.S. Census Bureau: the Northeast, known as the home of educated liberals (both liberalism and high levels of education correlate with atheism), has the lowest divorce rate, while the Bible Belt has the highest.
"The gap between what evangelicals preach about morality and what they do extends beyond their love lives. Federal Bureau of Prisons numbers show that Christians commit more crimes per person than atheists, who commit fewer than the followers of any religion.
"In the United States, the 'more religious a state’s population, the higher the crime, STD and teen pregnancy rates,' reports Al Westerfield in 'Knoxville News,' summing up the findings of empirical studies. The same pattern holds true when comparing countries: more religious people means more crime, more sexually transmitted diseases and higher teen pregnancy rates.
"The numbers make it all the more bewildering that Christians find atheists about as trustworthy as rapists.
"A '[U.K.] Guardian' article discussing what science says about non-believers concludes that atheists are 'less authoritarian and suggestible, less dogmatic, less prejudiced, more tolerant of others, law-abiding, compassionate, conscientious, and well-educated.' In a word, based on scientific research, atheists are moral. But that won’t sway evangelical Christians, as they are generally not big fans of science.
"They also won’t be moved by the Catholic Church’s acknowledgement that the godless can be good, moral people, since they do not follow the Pope.
"The truth is that adherence to a belief in right and wrong doesn’t require a belief in God, and the admirable lives of countless non-believers proves it."
("Atheists Have Stronger Family Values Than Evangelical Christians," by Piper Hoffman4 September 2013, at:
http://www.care2.com/causes/atheists-have-stronger-family-values-than-evangelical-christians.html#ixzz3RVPA2qmE)
D. Recent research: Atheists have lower rates than Believers in murder, racism, xenophobia, sexism, dogmatism, fundamentalism. corporeal punishment, anti-Semitism, environmental destruction, use of the death penalty/government torture, drug use, obesity, poverty, abortion, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases--plus higher inclinations than Believers toward kindness, ethics, safe sex, intelligence, verbal ability, free-thinking, human rights, family-taught problem solving, rationality and scientific literacy
(Posted by: steve benson, Date: February 12, 2015 12:48AM)
"Atheists More Motivated by Compassion than the Faithful""Why Do Americans Still Dislike Atheists?"
by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman
29 April 2011
"Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently 'spiritual' in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for non-theists; in other words, non-believers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.
"Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently--and uncivilly--declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering non-believers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.
"Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.
"A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency--issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights--the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.
"Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.
"As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.
"While many studies show that secular Americans don’t fare as well as the religious when it comes to certain indicators of mental health or subjective well-being, new scholarship is showing that the relationships among atheism, theism, and mental health and well-being are complex. After all, Denmark, which is among the least religious countries in the history of the world, consistently rates as the happiest of nations. And studies of apostates--people who were religious but later rejected their religion--report feeling happier, better and liberated in their post-religious lives.
"Non-theism isn’t all balloons and ice cream. Some studies suggest that suicide rates are higher among the non-religious. But surveys indicating that religious Americans are better off can be misleading because they include among the non-religious fence-sitters who are as likely to believe in God, whereas atheists who are more convinced are doing about as well as devout believers. On numerous respected measures of societal success--rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug use and crime, as well as economics--high levels of secularity are consistently correlated with positive outcomes in first-world nations. None of the secular advanced democracies suffers from the combined social ills seen here in Christian America.
"More than 2,000 years ago, whoever wrote Psalm 14 claimed that atheists were foolish and corrupt, incapable of doing any good. These put-downs have had sticking power. Negative stereotypes of atheists are alive and well. Yet like all stereotypes, they aren’t true — and perhaps they tell us more about those who harbor them than those who are maligned by them. So when [some] engage in [tactics] of division and destruction by maligning atheists, they do so in disregard of reality.
"As with other national minority groups, atheism is enjoying rapid growth. Despite the bigotry, the number of American non-theists has tripled as a proportion of the general population since the 1960s. Younger generations’ tolerance for the endless disputes of religion is waning fast. Surveys designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans--a fifth of the population--are not believers. Our non-religious compatriots should be accorded the same respect as other minorities."
("Why Do Americans Still Dislike Atheists?," Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, "Washington Post," 29 April 2011, at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-do-americans-still-dislike-atheists/2011/02/18/AFqgnwGF_story.html)
E. Recent studies: Atheists more emotionally-connected to generosity and more guided by compassion than Believers
(Posted by: steve benson, Date: February 12, 2015 12:48AM)
"Atheists More Motivated by Compassion than the Faithful"
by Live Science Staff
1 May 2012
"Atheists and agnostics are more driven by compassion to help others than are highly religious people, a new study finds.
"That doesn't mean highly religious people don't give, according to the research to be published in the July 2012 issue of the journal 'Social Psychological and Personality Science.' But compassion seems to drive religious people's charitable feelings less than it other groups.
"'Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,' study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. 'The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.'
"Willer's co-author Laura Saslow, now a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, became interested in the question of what motivates charity after a non-religious friend lamented that he donated money to earthquake recovery in Haiti only after seeing a heart-touching video of a woman being pulled from rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.
"'I was interested to find that this experience--an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers--was replicated in three large, systematic studies," Saslow said in a statement.
"In the first study, Saslow and her colleagues analyzed data from a national survey of more than 1,300 American adults taken in 2004. They found that compassionate attitudes were linked with how many generous behaviors a person was likely to report. But this link was strongest in people who were atheists or only slightly religious, compared with people who were more strongly religious. . . .
"In a second experiment, 101 adults were shown either a neutral video or an emotional video about children in poverty. They were then given 10 fake dollars and told they could give as much as they liked to a stranger. Those who were less religious gave more when they saw the emotional video first.
"'The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity," Willer said. "But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants.'
"Finally, a sample of more than 200 college students reported their current level of compassion and then played economic games in which they were given money to share or withhold from a stranger. Those who were the least religious but most momentarily compassionate shared the most.
"More research will be needed to understand what factors motivate religious people's giving, but the study makes clear that empathy and compassion are not the only factors at play.
"'Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people,' Willer said."
("Atheists More Motivated by Compassion than the Faithfulm" by Live Science Staff, 1 May 2012, at:
http://www.livescience.com/20005-atheists-motivated-)compassion.html)
F. In context: Positive data about Atheists
(Posted by: steve benson, Date: February 12, 2015 01:06AM
The above . . . references serve to update and clarify (meaning they do not fundamentally undermine) the earlier data. But it does serve to undercut , , , anti-atheist evangelizing. . . .
Welcome to the 21st century. Try to keep up.
G. Summation: Atheists are moral people. too
(Posted by: Ex-Sister Sinful Shoulders, Date: February 12, 2015 02:06AM)
After I resigned from the only true church, instead of calling me an immoral misfit, my mother wrote and whispered her euphemism for my decadence:
"California life-style" Oh... the shame. :)
Fight on, mighty immoral misfits!
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1512103,1512103#msg-1512103