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Belief In Hell Predicts a Country's Crime Rates Better Than Other Factors
An anonymous reader writes "Religion is often thought of as psychological defense against bad behavior, but researchers have recently found that the effect of religion on pro-social behaviors may actually be driven by the belief in hell and supernatural punishment rather than faith in heaven and spiritual benevolence. In a large analysis of 26 years of data consisting of 143,197 people in 67 countries, psychologists found significantly lower crime rates in societies where many people believe in hell compared to those where more people believed in heaven."
"Shariff noted that because the findings were based off of correlational data, they do not prove causation."
/. reader :)
Must be a regular
Bark less. Wag more.
Therefore, the only logical choice is to believe in religion as an evolutionary strategy to advance the human race!
Ha! Suck it fundamentalist atheists! You're on the losing side of the evolution fight this time!
Who else believes in hell?
Psychologists found significantly lower crime rates in societies where many people believe in hell compared to those where more people believed in heaven."
If there's good then there's evil. If there's a God then there's a Devil. If there's a Heaven then there's a Hell.
How can there be one without the other?
169 cancer patients were studied. Cancer showed a stronger correlation with a preference for apples than with a preference for oranges.
Gently reply
The hell you say!
Sweden? Noraway? Japan? Help me out here, did they exclude anything that didn't fit?
If I'm reading this right, the actual statistics show that belief in Heaven increases crime by approximately the same rate as belief in in Hell decreases it.
So the net result is that believing in both has not statistical signifigance.
Belief in chart:
Heaven, Hell, Net Effect
0, 0, None
0, 1, Less Crime
1, 0, More Crime
1, 1, None
The headline is making a very dangerous and intentional omission of fact here. http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039048&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039048.t001
AccountKiller
I'm curious how this is consistent with http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Zuckerman_on_Atheism.pdf which makes a convincing case that religion in an area is correlated with more social primes, including more crime. Putting these together it looks like more religious countries generally have more crime and violence, but controlling for religiosity levels, belief in hell is correlated with a reduction in crime rates. But clearly more research needs to occur.
Here in the US, we are told there is constant threat of terrorism, which is used to keep people in line. So other countries simply use Hell instead, which seems to be more effective.. provided you can get people to truly believe in hell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
The heaven side convinces the 99% to accept their fate, the hell side warns them what happens if they don't.
Unfortunately, Christianity has a get out of jail free card so you get the occasional douchbag that takes "I am the truth, the way, and the light" literally and screws everyone they can. This seems pretty common in those that are super Catholic, and less so in casual Christians. YMMV.
I think if the rationalists take over you would see a steep rise in vigilantism... but if an armed society is a polite society then I think it follows that a society that doesn't believe you will get what's coming to you "eventually" will be a cautious society.
Have gnu, will travel.
Little Boy: The Devil is evil?
Pastor: Yes my boy.
Little Boy: But why is the Devil evil? He punishes all the bad people.
Pastor: >slap
Let us all go to hell. At least there is a party there...
Aren't those basically the same people? The number of those only believing in one is small enough to make the study basically random alone. Even worse, those few people are scattered across 60 countries, with the crime rates of those countries were used to determine how guilty the participants (who may all have been innocent) were. There are many flaws with that: for example, couldn't it be possible that higher crime rates drive more people to seek refuge in faith?
Actually you did not. Belief and heaven and hell have exactly opposite effects on crime rates. The wording is misleading, but it is correct.
AccountKiller
Maybe believing in a fantasy underworld just indicates paranoia which might not be conducive to being a criminal.
According to Table 1 of the study, the choices of religious affiliation include "Roman Catholic," "Other Christian," and "Muslim."
That would seem to ignore much of the world's population, beginning with Jews and continuing on to the various religions that believe in reincarnation.
They claim to have drawn their data from publicly available sources. I'd love to hear how they spun that data to achieve their sample.
Breakfast served all day!
Of course, it doesn't take into account what happens in the criminal justice system - they make sure to get you right with Jesus/Yaweh/Allah. I refuse to believe that Buddhist countries have worse violent crime rates. What defines a crime? The moral code of the country, often built upon these religions that believe in Hell.
"I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible. Here you'll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank."
It would follow that, in order to achieve these socially desirable ends,e.g., lower crime rates, governments and religions should instill and promulgate belief in a vengeful God and in divine punishment. Plato had much the same idea in his Republic when he introduced the idea of the "noble lie", a constructed mythology that would be taught to all in order to promote social harmony and love of the State. Excellent for the myth-makers, who shape our minds for our own good -- and their own benefit.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
If you must believe in hell then hell must not exist in your country as an actuality.
Therefore, your country probably doesn't have a very high crime rate.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I really doubt it because it's a rather well know fact by now (e.g. research by Zimbardo et. al) that the majority of people that commit crimes don't actually think about the future before committing them. They don't even think a few months in advance, let alone at what happens after life ...
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Quite a disgrace. "Heaven" and "hell" are concepts that may be believable to children (but they should _not_ be exposed to them), but for adults to believe in them is just pathetic. Seems under all that civilization, you still find a lot of the cave-men that are governed by irrational fears.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It proves nothing of cause and effect... I would imagine that most 'god fearing' nations would also have more laws, police and prisons too, which personally id say that would be more of a deterrent than a believe in some mythical place.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If God exists, how can there be evil, a Devil, and Hell? Why would a perfect and benevolent being have need to create of such things? If all things come from God, then God created evil.
People who live in Detroit? All they have to do is open a window and look outside.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Indeed some people believe religion was created as a way to police crime.
In part of the study I read on NPR, kids were put in a room and told to take a test. Half of the kids were told there was a ghost in the room. Those that thought they were being watched were less likely to cheat.
.....wut
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
So if a person has committed crimes during his life, e.g burglary, violence, fraud and a bit of adultery thrown in for good measure, most believers would say that he will go to Hell and burn in all eternity for his sins.
So does the punishment befit the crime(s)?
Is torturing somebody by subjecting them to continuous pain, suffering and torment for an infinite length of time justifiable for whatever they did during the ~80 odd years of life on Earth?
What about after the first trillion years of torture? Dont you think that would be enough considering the crimes committed?
What about when the misery and torture has reached a few billion trillion years?
And dont forget, 10 to the power of 10000000000000000000000000 years is not even the most insignificant fraction of eternity.
No crime I can possibly think of can ever justify that level of torture.
If this is how the universe works, then whatever Deity created this system is a monster of the highest order.
... where fewer believed in hell.
FTFY, AC
I wonder if this is skewed by certain Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, where the punishments for even minor crimes are so severe that people really are deterred. That would account for a third variable with a causal relationship to the two correlated variables mentioned. Just a thought.
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
We are motivated more by fear and greed than love. Same mechanism that makes capitalism work better than communism.
People that believe they will suffer dire consequences are less likely to commit a crime. Really? Imagine that.
It states: Articles about religion on slashdot tend to bring out lots of people on various sides posting about how ignorant, stupid and foolish everyone who disagrees with them about religion is.
(And thus imply how enlightened and intelligent the posters are, by comparison.)
Details at 11.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Nope, they're pointing out that the stick might be greater than the carrot in preventing wrongdoing. Hopefully the carrot is greater than the stick in causing beneficence.
As far as I know there are no concrete concepts of either hell or heaven in Judaism.
Nor did Jesus teach about any sort of eternal conscious torment. Part of the problem is that some churches have conflated two concepts, Sheol and Gehenna, into "hell". Sheol (also called Hades) is the grave, an unconscious state of being ("the dead are aware of nothing", Eccl 9:5) in which the dead sleep awaiting resurrection. Gehenna (from the Hebrew for Hinnom Valley) is literally the name of a valley where garbage was destroyed through burning, and it symbolically refers to destruction of the incorrigible with no hope of resurrection, not eternal conscious torment.
The Hebrew Scriptures have a concept of a kingdom of God that will destroy the kingdoms of man (1 Chr 29:10-12; Daniel 2:44, 4:3).
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Next time video the jehova's witnesses
Jay-dubs... video? OK, I'll bite. This is what Jehovah's Witnesses actually believe: God hates a hunk of purple plastic.
... compared to those who DON'T believe in imaginary friends/foes? I'm sure i've read a study somewhere in America's deep south where the incidence of murder/rape increased with the level of religous zealotry.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
God created Lucifer with free will, and Lucifer used that free will to choose to rebel against God and become Satan the Devil. God allows Satan to continue with his wickedness to prove a point, namely that Satan's style of rule is not what is best for humankind. This is what Jehovah's Witnesses actually believe.
In the Chinese bootleg of Revenge of the Sith, called Backstroke of the West, "Jedi Council" was translated as "Presbyterian Church". So I'd guess after some hand-waving, Jedi were counted as Other Christian.
most believers would say that [an exceedingly wicked person] will go to Hell and burn in all eternity for his sins. So does the punishment befit the crime(s)?
No. What befits the crimes is a trip to the incinerator. The Bible doesn't teach eternal conscious torment.
A man dies and he goes to hell.
A devil greets him and says: "Welcome to hell. Since you're going to stay here for the eternity, please let me guide you to a tour of the place".
The tour starts in a marvelous garden filled with trees, colourful flowers, beautiful animals running around and a majestic castle in the middle of it.
"Come on, there's your room for the stay" incitest the devil.
The newcomer is speechless, he just nods and walks on.
Once inside the castle, he sees wonderful clean rooms. The pair pass through an immense lobby, finely decorated with shiny carpets and tapestries.
Next is a dining room, filled with esotic scents.
The man notices a library too. Oh, what a library! thousands of books perfectly fitted in the bookcases.
Up to a marble staircase, the two stop in a room.
"Here's your place, sir" says the devil while pointing in.
Inside the really big room there's every comfort one can ever desire: a double royal bed with silk sheets, a fireplace, leather sofas, mirrors, fine carpets and whatnot.
At some point, the man walks in front of a window and looks out.
Horrified he sees a burning lava sea with lots of people immersed to the neck in it, while hordes of devils whip the poor souls continously.
"Wha..what the fuck is that!?!" he asks.
"That's the Christian's hell" the devil calmly answers "that's how they want it".
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
There is no hell in the old testament, baby Jesus fessed up to owning a dungeon in part 2.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Of course there's a hell. It's a place where everyone owns Macs except for me, and I'm stuck going to coffee shops with a 386 laptop running Windows 95 and a 300 baud acoustic modem. And everyone points at me and laughs and I realize suddenly that I'm not wearing any pants but I have to give the commencement address. And then I wake up and realize I'm standing in the TSA line at the airport and I still am not wearing any pants and nobody is left on Slashdot with any kind of sense of humor. Yes, there's a hell.
Atheists lack a defining text. And people think managing programmers is like herding cats. Unification of agenda under a grand banner is mostly a theist creation.
Apparently, we hadn't properly solved the equations for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma after three decades of study and you suspect on gut instinct that the grand mechanism of fitness is tapped out? Let me guess, you're soon about to argue that lack of a moral code correlates with lack of fitness?
Bee Eye Enn Gee Oh.
Shortly after the 1983 Korean Air Lines Flight 007 incident I attended some Sunday services at a televised evangelical church in Toronto out of courtesy to the family I was boarding with. One of the speakers they invited was Hal Lindsey. I don't recall the other guests by name. In one service it was preached that America engage in eye-for-eye tactics and shoot down an equivalent aircraft from the Soviet sphere. Nice. Well, America evened the score on quick trigger fingers not long after with the Iran Air Flight 655 incident in 1988. If we had deliberately boarded the eye-for-an-eye bus, we'd now be asking the Irish for advice on how to cool the exchange.
The other sermon I recall rather vividly was the claim that the rapidly rising disease in western society was a sign of God's wrath. He was referring in particular to the number of distinct diagnostic categories, completely oblivious to the fact that refinements in diagnostic category are the hallmark of science making progress. Where we used to have one lump for infectious disease, we now distinguish thousands of pathogens, all the way down to minor strains.
FOX News excluded, mental health in America has probably never been better. I watched the extremely difficult movie Breaking the Waves over the weekend. There wasn't a shred of mental health in evidence in that nasty Calvinist congregation. Every one of them would rather crush pint glasses with their bare hands than seek help for depression. Hitchens was exceedingly vocal about how Mother Teresa defined misery as next to godliness. She did almost nothing to alleviate suffering.
As society less frequently accepts that suffering is next to godliness, more people seek treatment for minor mental health conditions. The same data you cite reads to me as major progress.
If one were absolutely committed to the belief there was no afterlife and no consequences for their actions in life beyond death then any anti-social behavior could be rationalized as calculated risk.
You could do that even if you weren't an atheist. You simply have to believe in a certain kind of afterlife (one where murderers aren't punished, for instance). Fortunately, however, atheists aren't typically bloodthirsty murderers. I suppose that could happen, but it tends not to.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Both heaven and hell are fictional places from mithologies and supersticions (Organized supersticions are usualy refered as religion, but that is no indication of the accuracy of their adsurd ideas). Basically if you believe in either of them, you are an idiot.
The Christian answer is that the evidence is God coming to earth in the person of Jesus - dying for the sins of the world and being raised to new life as recorded in the Scriptures. Claims about the personality of God such as "love" and are backed up by the historical events of the crucifiction and resurrection (eg John 3:16 - God so loved the world that he gave his only Son).
Now maybe you don't accept that evidence. Fair enough. But in order to fathom why Christians believe that God has certain personality traits, the evidence that we are basing our understanding on is the person and work of Jesus as revealed in the Scriptures.
I have no idea where the authors found their data, but it is not from this earth that we live on for sure.
Why does Sweden and Norway have among the highest "Crime Index z-scores"?, whatever that means? I mean, does Sweden have a higher crime index than Tanzania, Brazil or the US for that matter??
I subject to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Please find any study where Sweden and Norway have among the highest crime rates.
The authors are worse than "damned liars" I say.
In Muslim countries killing your kids for honour, raping non-Muslims, stealing from non muslims and destroying there places of worship is seen as a virtue and not a crime.
1. Data mining
> no correction has been made for inflated error rates due to performing a large number of analyses
Also, the correlations for beleif in heaven and belief in hell are both large and of the opposite sign. A classic red flag for data mining, i.e. torturing the data until you get the result you want.
2. Garbage data
If you look at the article, it claims that Russia is a far more law-abiding country than Australia.
However when you look at the one crime statistic that is very reliable, we see that Russian has 84 murders per day = 217 per million people per year. Australia has about 260 per year = 11 per million people per year. That is, Russia's murder rate is 20 times higher. Yet we are supposed to believe that Russia has a lower crime rate than Australia.
If this is at all representative of the quality of their data, it is a sad joke.
http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/advice/Russia
yep, but christians only apply the good personality traits and completely leave out the genocidal, misogynistic, child abuser etc side.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Now maybe you don't accept that evidence.
That'a not "evidence", that's a bunch of wild claim about supposed events that took place a very long time ago. A fossil bone, a rusty sword or a floor plan of an ancient villa is much more a piece of evidence than any old mythological book.
Ezekiel 23:20
I will be damned!
"I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings." (Luke 16:9, NIV) And thus I see where Jehovah's Witnesses get some of their ideas.
I assume you're referring to a verse later in the chapter that refers to some sort of torment in Hades: "And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, he existing in torments" (Luke 16:23, NWT). That changes things slightly; I'll have to bring it up at my next Bible study. But torment doesn't necessarily mean conscious torment; it could be symbolic of being "conscious of nothing" (Eccl. 9:5). And even if Hades is conscious torment, it still isn't eternal conscious torment, as "death and Hades [will be] thrown into the lake of fire [in] the second death." --Rev 20:14.
The reason crime rates in the USA hasn't shot through the roof is because you can go on welfare or get Obamacare.
Get rid of that and watch what happens.
Yeshua preached more about Hell than he preached about Heaven.
That's because he didn't want anyone to be destroyed in Gehenna if at all possible. But he still had much to say about the kingdom of the heavens, such as all of Matthew 24.
What would a loving God do to anybody who has repeatedly shown that he isn't willing to turn away from sin and accept God's love? A loving God who sees a bunch of lifelong unrepentant dciks would protect his followers.
Is this really surprising? One of the main purposes religion served "back in the day" was to keep the unwashed masses under control. They were almost completely uneducated / illiterate but they could understand the concept of a big bad place called "hell" (or whatever underworld their religion believed in) and a fear of "god" sending them somewhere like that was enough to keep many people in line. Certainly "eternal damnation" is a lot scarier to those who believe in it than spending a few years in prison.
I'd like to see a breakdown between two different kinds of belief in hell:
* The kind of belief where a believer worries about his or her own chance of ending up in hell.
* The kind of belief where a believer thinks that he or she is guaranteed a place in heaven (for example by saying the magic words, "I accept Jesus Christ as my Personal Savior"), and where hell is only for the foolish and/or evil others who don't believe the same things.
The idea that people would actually choose to go to Hell is utterly ludicrous, nothing more than a way for sanctimonious twits to feel less guilty about their cruel philosophy, a sick blame-the-victim mentality.
Or did anybody else start bleeding out of their ears and nose trying to make sense of the graphs in that paper?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Let's see, where do I start?
What about Buddhist countries? Or China, with a quarter of the world's population? Or India, with more than another 1G? What "Creator's hell" is there? Just starting to skim the link leaves me wondering if they only studied countries that were primarily Judeo-Xian-Islamic.
How does it break down: how many of the "higher crime" countries are a) what used to be called Third World, that were conquered and ruled by westerners, and b) how many are in countries with huge unemployment (like Spain, right now, or Palestine)?
And how do they define it? When they say "hell", do the respondents think "purgatory", or are they thinking Christian infinite punishment for limited evil?
mark
i.e. as we look across our white picket fences into our our crime infested neighborhoods, we believe that we are living the better life...and that those criminals will go to hell. easy to believe in a hell when you build up the walls and identify people as "others"
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Not really true, in Christianity there is no Hell so the stick doesn't work very well and once "saved is always saved" so the carrot only works once.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I don't understand why you say this
Why I say ""A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B"? I say it because, err, umm, it's true. Srsly.
Because the fact is that you have to prove a causation by noting its correlation.
And, given a correlation, you can hypothesise a causation: people respond to negative stimuli when avoiding a situation. But just parroting "correlation does not equal causation" is complete anti-intellectual fappery. Correlation IMPLIES there's a causation. It doesn't tell us what the causation IS,
Or, to put it differently, ""A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B", as somebody once said.
but then again, so what?
"So" people shouldn't necessarily assume, solely from an observation that A and B are correlated, that A necessarily causes B or even is likely to cause B. There may be other reasons to hypothesize that the causation is "A causes B" rather than "B causes A" or "C causes A and B", but, absent those other reasons, it might be worth investigating the other possibilities, and it may be worth it even with those other reasons.
So "correlation does not imply causation" might be a too-broad and too-easily-misinterpreted response to "A and B are correlated, therefore A causes B", with the right response being a more nuanced "OK, what if B caused A, or something else caused both of them?", if there's a reason to believe that might be the case. (In this particular case, what if there's a characteristic that causes both a tendency to belief in hell (or hellfire) and a tendency not to commit crimes or, at least, the violent crimes the rates of which were most strongly negatively correlated with belief in hell and positively correlated with belief in heaven?)
the quote 'in societies where many people believe in hell compared to those where more people believed in heaven." is contradictory. in what religeon(s) do they preach in only one or the other ? afaik, if you believe in one, you have to also believe in the other. as in, 'if you don't make it to heaven, where do you go " its sad that people don't realise there is a way to build a heaven on earth, and it only takes honorable measures to acheive it. not greed.
happy trials
in Christianity there is no Hell
Then why does Jesus discuss Hell multiple times?
Anyways, amazing so many people can "love" some deity when HE is holding a metaphorical gun to to their head, in the form of Hell. That ain't a deity I wanna worship. That's rape.
Now troubles are many, they're as deep as a well.
I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell.
Swear there ain't no heaven and I pray there ain't no hell,
But I'll never know by living, only my dying will tell.
They were right. We'll all find out (or not) eventually.
Let's just hope it's a long, long time until we do.
All souls are immortal
The word translated "soul" (Hebrew nefesh and Greek psyche) refers to any living person or animal (Genesis 1:20, 24, 9:10), considered with respect to its experiences, thoughts, and actions. The Bible mentions gathering manna "according to the number of the souls that each of you has in his tent" (Exodus 16:16) and "eight souls [...] carried safely through the water" on Noah's barge (1 Peter 3:20). Souls die (Ezekiel 18:20) and afterward are unconscious (Psalm 146:4; Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10). This state is likened to sleep (Acts 7:60; 1 Corinthians 15:6). Think about it this way: if souls see something when the body is dead, wouldn't Lazarus have had something to say about it (John 11:11-14)?
The word translated "spirit" (Hebrew ruach and Greek pneuma) literally means "breath" but refers more broadly to that force that sustains life (James 2:26). Once the body dies, the spirit goes out like a candle's flame.
A fundamental Christian doctrine is that God created us as 3-fold beings: body, soul, & spirit.
What verse mentions this threefold condition of man?
the Holy Spirit works via your reborn spirit to renew your mind to a more godly mindset. That is the Christian program, in a nutshell.
Agreed.
It is those who are driven by their lower natures, those who refuse to listen to the call of God, it is they who will spend eternity
...destroyed in the lake of fire called Gehenna. Paul wrote that "the wages sin pays is death" (Romans 6:23), not eternal conscious torment. What verse mentions eternal conscious torment in the lake of fire for humans?
God is not a bad god. He did everything in His power to educate you and help you to find Him so that you could avoid
..."eternal death in our rejection of God", as the Episcopal Church defines hell. I too want to enjoy "the primal source of joy and good things", which is why I seek to do what God wants and stay away from what he hates.
But how does that translate into "torture for eternity my non-followers"?
It doesn't. Those who do their best to pay God's love forward will be resurrected into a paradise. Those who do not will be incinerated in the lake of fire. It is not the eternal conscious torment popularly associated with the term "hell", because that would not be fair. It's a brief period of burning to death, followed by cessation of existence.
Luke 13:28 [...] sounds pretty much conscious.
Which is consistent with a brief conscious period of torment during destruction, in which "There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth", followed by an eternal period of cessation of existance.
Then why does Jesus discuss Hell multiple times?
Poor translations;
The whole of it boils down to one verse of Paranoid delusions, of John of Patmos.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm not sure I follow. Sure, it's historical evidence, not scientific evidence. Of course it should be held up to the same scrutiny as any other historical evidence, and the conclusion you come to may be that it's insufficient - even laughable, depending on what your examination of it reveals.
It seems counterproductive, though, to beg the question by calling it a "wild claim" and "mythological" right out of the gate.
For example, both a "floor plan of an ancient villa" and an account of observable, physical events (what the New Testament purports to be) seem to me to fall into the same category of documentation of something from a long time ago that we can no longer directly observe.
Buddhism by itself is an athiest religion - there is no such thing as God in a purely Buddhist worldview.
Budda says enlightenment is possible without god, but this doesn't mean he disputed the existence of gods. Quite contrary because gods also are subject to the circle of life: Sasra.