Prison figures show a link between sex crime and religion
Posted on: July 6, 2010 - 7:45pm
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Prison figures show a link between sex crime and religion
Prison figures show a link between sex crime and religion
It makes sense that religions of sexual repression like Christianity would have a large percentage of sex offenders. Religions that glorifies poverty have a lot of fraudsters.
Why would the godless be burglars? Any theories?
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
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One of the reasons I reject the "atheist make up less than 0.2% of the prison population" argument is because many people convert to religion while in prison, as this article mentions.
Also I think the article explains why the link exists
Signature ? How ?
Out of curiosity, It would be great to have more comprehensive stats on admission into the prison (and before those vultures get at them).
Anyway, you shouldn't reject the argument for that reason.
You should reject the argument as one for validity in the same way any rational person would reject a reverse argument if even 90% were atheists. Religion is false regardless of who believes it. As to arguments to social effect, neither are valid either because no causative link is demonstrated (e.g. it's perfectly likely that lower I.Q. [or something else] causes both religion and criminality, and converting people to any given belief or lack thereof will not change I.Q. [or potentially whatever other factor it is]) .
As far as arguments go, causation is much more rational than mere correlation and assumptions.
That's not to say it isn't worth pointing out (it is an interesting fact)- it's just not much of an argument no matter what the statistics are.
Yah, I don't think that it is really responsible to come up with theories based on what is really a newspaper article that tells people that a study exists. I would rather see the actual study for myself so that I can determine what the authors have come up with and whether I agree with the data as collected.
As a point of comparison, there is the similar study from the US that some cite to show that there are hardly any atheists in the nation's prison systems.
Well, I once spent an afternoon trying to get that work out of the internet. I eventually found a document that was a few hundred pages long that seems to match well. At best, it was a final report but it did have lots of data tables to read and work with.
Of note is that the person who is often purported to be the author turns out not to have been a lead author at all. She was involved in the processing of the data and specifically on one section that did mention religion.
However, the nature of the document was such that it did not contain the actual numbers which are often cited in the specific form that they tend to appear. Pretty much someone took information out of this huge document, manipulated it and formatted it into a nice little chart in a way that the researchers did not originally present.
Lacking access to the original data and the documentation on how the study was written and the data collected, I do not even see any specific reason why the data must be presented in any particular manner. Although, assuming that the lead authors know why the final report was formatted in some specific way, there is likely at least an explainable reason why the data is presented in the way that they did and not the way that tends to appear on blogs and forums.
As far as this UK study goes, any of the above issues and possibly others may well be present in the translation from a final report (or worse yet, a summary for the general public media) to the newspaper article we stand linked to.
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