Quote:
Originally Posted by mikebnllnb
Not surprising.
Crime rates and religious beliefs
GOVERNMENTS labouring to deliver effective crime-prevention policies could do worse than consider divine deterrence. In a paper published this summer in PLoS ONE, Azim Shariff at the University of Oregon and Mijke Rhemtulla at the University of Kansas compared rates of crime with rates of belief in heaven and hell in 67 countries. Citizens of those countries were asked which of heaven and hell they believed in, and each country’s overall "rate of belief" was calculated by subtracting the percentage of hell-believers from that of heaven-believers. The researchers found that the degree to which each country’s citizens believed more strongly in heaven than in hell predicted higher national crime rates. It seems that believing more strongly in the forgiveness of sins than in punishment in the after-life may help pave the way for further transgressions. The researchers also noted that the proportion of people believing in heaven almost always outweighed the proportion believing in hell. So a little more preaching on the fiery furnace might be beneficial in this life, if not also the next.
Daily chart: The Devil's in the deterrent | The Economist |
We already had a thread on this. Apart from the old false correlation problem, it might be the case that hellthreat was a deterrent to crime. It has been observed that a purely heaven/hell stick and carrot worldview might be necessary to keep people in order where they had no other kind of moral back -up. I have seen some indications that, if such persons lose their faith (and fear of hellthreat) the may well go off the rails, because they have not been given the opportunity, like those of us who do not believe in hellthreat, to develop a responsible moral behaviour code as an alternative.
So, while the results may well be indisputable, the conclusions which some are going to be only too willing to jump to - that we need religion to keep people in order, true or not - is not insidputable.
P.s of course, we only get selected bits of the study presented.
Bits like this are ignored
"For example, university students with stronger beliefs in in God’s punitive and angry nature tended to be the least likely to cheat on an academic task, whereas stronger beliefs in God’s comforting and forgiving nature significantly predicted higher levels of cheating
[7]. These results remained robust after controlling for plausible third variable candidates."
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