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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.
what about those of us who long ago realized hell is all there is and we're there now, broadcasting live -- HI MOM!!!
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Actually, some people argue that Hell was created later and added to the Bible. A hell mythology is quite popular everywhere so if you start out without it'll be added sooner or later.
If hell impacts good behavior and heaven does not, then one would expect Buddhists to do well right? They do not have heaven but they can get really bad Karma... Good karma is not Heaven but bad Karma could be bad enough to be considered a form of hell.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
As an atheist, I didn't used to, but then I spent a few weeks in Arkansas. If that's not hell, I don't know what is...
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.
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...
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
Religion, no. Hell, yes. If humans believe in both Heaven and Hell there will be no net effect on the crime rates.
Ha! Suck it fundamentalist deists! You're on the no statistical significance side of the evolution fight this time!
AccountKiller
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!
Who else believes in hell?
Well, let's look at The Fine Paper:
So presumably some flavors of "Other" believe in a hell of some sort (for example, "being reincarnated as something in the "sucks to be you" category" might fill the bill), as does Islam. I don't see "IL" in Figure 1, so, unless I've missed something, there's no country where Judaism is a national majority (I'm assuming it's still a national majority in Israel), so I'm not sure it addresses the "Judeo" part of that.
(Oh, and the data point for the US is a fair bit above the line, meaning a higher crime rate for the US's value of {believers in hell} - {believers in heaven} than the line would predict. I don't know whether that's significant; if it is, maybe hell is a less effective deterrent here in the City on the Hill.)
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.
It might help if you took a comparative religion course. Many people believe in God without a belief in a Devil. This applies for example to many liberal Christians. In Judaism, the closest thing to the Devil is "Satan" who acts more as a prosecuting angel or a gadfly in the heavenly court. This interpretation is based on pretty old sources including the actual mentions of Satan in the Old Testament, especially the book of Job.
Similarly, many forms of Christianity have a notion heaven without any notion of hell. This is common among Christians who ascribe to universal reconciliation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_reconciliation and similar beliefs. Some other groups believe that there is either heaven or oblivion- this belief is common among Jehovah Witnesses for example. Similarly, many forms of Judaism have a notion of purgatory but no equivalent of hell. Indeed, there's a belief common among Orthodox Jews that no matter how bad you are you won't suffer for more than a year in the afterlife. This is related to the tradition of saying, Kaddish, the prayer for the dead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaddish for 11 months- one wants to ease their suffering but one does not want to imply that that someone was so bad that they were being punished for a full year.
In the other direction, you have some belief systems that have a notion similar to hell but no equivalent of heaven. For example, in some forms of Buddhism, there are very unpleasant things one can be reincarnated to to suffer for milllenia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism) but there's no real equivalent of heaven. So one can not only have a belief in heaven with no belief in hell, one can have a belief in hell with no belief in heaven.
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."
Yeah, and if there are humans, there must be anti-humans. Also there must be a specific anti person for each person. There must be anti-money, anti-colour... What? Can you explain that point again either in terms of formal logic, or citing evidence? As an arbitrary whimsical deist I believe in god and heaven, but not hell or the devil. Can you prove me wrong about hell's nonexistence or even give a logical train of thought other than 'it is self evident'?
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
As far as I know there are no concrete concepts of either hell or heaven in Judaism.
(Puts on buzz killington outfit)
Actually, the judeo christian bible is quite clear about what happens to unriteous people when they die. (Saying "sinners" implies a false dichotomy. All people are sinners by biblical standards.)
The old testament uses the term "grave" in most english translations. The original hebrew word was "sheol", which actually means "null", "nonexistence", "void", "emptiness", etc. Lit. The state of no longer being.
The current version of popular "hell", is a purely dogmatic construct with only the most minimal of biblical support, (namely the noteworthy reference in revelation to a lake of fire.) Its primary point of origin can be historically traced to the "christianization" of norther europe, where the indigionous religious belif held that those that died a "non glorious" death, such as by old age, sickness, accident, etc, were sent to a cold and harsh afterlife managed by the epynomous "hel", a frost giantess. the realm itself was also of the same name.
To better bring these forced converts into harmony with church doctrines, the role of hell changed, but the idea that undesirables go there did not.
The obvious utility of imposing an eternal punishment of unbelievable suffering and torment for disobeying religious teachings and dogma is self-evident, and is precisely why the dogma still endures long after its original parent religion's demise.
As for "if there is a heaven, there must be a hell", this is fundamentally untrue. The judeo-christian faith, as written, (not as commonly practiced, more's the pity) has no such concept, and simply has god destroying the unriteous outright, cleanly, utterly, and humanely. They die, and that's that.
Depends.
Given the notoriety of the Bible Belt, I'm inclined to think that they're not strong on believing they'll be punished. Others might, but they won't, so effectively they don't believe in hell as pertains to them.
The Buddhists* don't strictly believe in heaven OR hell, but do believe that you're either cycling endlessly in futility or step off the hamster wheel of incarnation. If phrased in Judeo-Christian terms, this would be a heaven without a hell.
*Ok, some Buddhist sects believe in a hell, but they also believe that those within it can be ransomed out (via the "Hungry Ghosts" ceremony) or will get pardoned eventually as a result of several Buddhist deities holding a protest camp outside. But this isn't a hell in the Judeo-Christian sense for that very reason, it's not permanent**.
**But, then, some Gnostic Judeo-Christian texts talk of Jesus' "three days in Hell" as being one of a major revolution in which Hell is emptied out and closed down, permanently, so there were Judeo-Christians who believed there had BEEN a Hell but wasn't one now. That can complicate questionnaires like this, so I suppose the researchers are kinda glad most of the Gnostics got burned at the stake by various Holy Roman Emperors.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, the Western concept of Hell is mostly based on Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost -- likewise the concept of alien beings being white with halos and dove's wings, and others being red with forked tails, goat's horns and pitchforks is something that comes from popular culture and not theological treatises.
Added to this, if you look in the Christian Bible or any of the Jewish religious works, you'll see that earlier works only refer to Abaddon or Hades, and even later works rarely refer to Hell (8 references, mostly in Matthew, also in Mark, Luke, James and 2 Peter, with the Matthew and Mark ones paraphrasing the same sermons). Original references to Hell in the Bible are attributed to Jesus, Paul, James and Peter. Of these, Peter describes it as gloomy (similar to Hades), James as fiery, Jesus and Paul purely as a place Angels and Humans can be exiled to, possibly with a gate and wall.
What am I getting at here? Mostly that this study is likely mostly useless, as the entire concept of what Hell is and who goes there and for what varies wildly throughout history and geography/culture. Nowadays, most people apply the Yin/Yan dichotomy to Heaven and Hell; others have labelled Hell as being "not Heaven", and then of course there's the "Heaven's Prison" and "Place of Eternal Torment" depictions mentioned in the Bible.
I'd be more interested in seeing this study done looking at belief in a benevolent creator and belief in a malignant rebel; the results may be the same, but that's in no way guaranteed.
Unfortunately this might be true. Religious people tend to have more babies, so it's not surprising that there may be a religious gene that gets preferable treatment. I've also noticed that the more uneducated, religious, bigoted or prejudiced people are, the more children they have.
It's a depressing state of affairs if you ask me.
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."
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
People that believe they will suffer dire consequences are less likely to commit a crime. Really? Imagine that.
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).
Of these, Peter describes it as gloomy (similar to Hades), James as fiery
Are they talking about the same hell? Hades and Gehenna are two different hells, as I mentioned elsewhere, and translators have confused them.
so out-breed them! :)
i don't understand people who have an idea how the world should be, yet they decide it's not worth bringing a child into the world as it is. if people like us don't breed, then the world will never be as we would like it.
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.
Heaven and Hell are place names, heaven and hell are descriptions of situations or emotional states. "I'm in Heaven" implies I'm dead, "I'm in heaven" implies I'm on the recieving end of a blow job.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
However, recent studies suggest that not all religious beliefs are equal in this respect. Though supernatural punishment is associated with increases in normative behavior, laboratory research reveals the concept of supernatural benevolence to be associated with decreases in normative behavior
As predicted, rates of belief in heaven and hell had significant, unique, and opposing effects on crime rates.
AccountKiller
Religious people tend to have more babies
The statistics seem to indicate that might not be true.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
Good article on this here: http://www.cracked.com/article_18757_5-things-you-wont-believe-arent-in-bible.html
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
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.
where there is no infrastructure, there is religion.
when a ruling power cannot effectively educate it's people, there are religious people doing it for them (for free!).
Its not 'for free', they have to sell their souls.
in this way you could take religion as being a kind of base level of education that will reach everywhere.
the goal of an enlightened society is to educate people even halfway as effectively, or they'll be dominated by supernatural thought.
religion will keep a people alive, but rarely can they achieve greatness without demystifying the world.
I've recently been working in a developing country, in what I thought was a university. Turns out this 'university' is a front for christian missionaries and despite handing out degrees the quality of education is laughable. About 85% of the teaching staff have NO KNOWLEDGE of the subjects they are pretending to teach. But they feel good about what they do because they are spreading the word of god. Its pretty detestable stuff. And its stifling genuine education, which is EXACTLY what they want.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
so out-breed them! :)
i don't understand people who have an idea how the world should be, yet they decide it's not worth bringing a child into the world as it is. if people like us don't breed, then the world will never be as we would like it.
The reluctance of people in the 'educated' world to have kids is wierd. I myself never thought I wanted to have kids. It wasn't until I was much older that I realised what a terrible mistake I'd made. This was after reading Nietzsche and realising something about myself, about kids and what they are.
The human race is on a journey. We travel from the bestial to the superhuman. Each child is a step on that journey. If we continue to have children, to nurture them, to raise them to be better than us, stronger, smarter, more bold than us, we contribute to that journey. One must feel... almost threatened by ones children; that one day they may beat us, defeat us, exceed us, show us for the lazy ignorant sluggards that we are (compared to them). If we carry on like this then one day our descendants will be to us as we are to the animals.
Children are explorers and colonists that we send into the future. If you don't send em, someone else will and the future will be colonised by them not you. Also, I think what wonders these explorers will uncover in that 'undiscovered country'.
If you don't have kids then perhaps you don't think the future is worth colonising and that theres nothing worthwhile discovering there... That the superhuman that waits in the destiny of our species perhaps should not come to exist?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
There are some problems with your argument, although the quote from Sherman is a pretty good point. Mainly, people don't use Paris to describe an emotional state. Not like they do with heaven. They might say something is like being in Paris, but that is still obviously referring to the city in France.
Heaven and Hell are concepts, just as much as they are places described in the Christian bible. When referring to the Christian Heaven/Hell then capitalization is correct. When referring to the abstract idea that happens to share the same names in English as the Christian places, you should not use capitalization.
Hell is where Satan lives, Heaven is where Jesus awaits. heaven is where you get to go after you die if you were good, hell is where you go if you were bad. Concepts, not places.
It's like if there is a burger shop called Burger Shop. That shop should be referred to as Burger Shop, but the idea of a burger shop is fine being referred to as burger shop. OK?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
when a ruling power cannot effectively educate it's people, there are religious people doing it for them (for free!).
Bingo.
It'll never happen, but if the USA wants to end terrorism against them the solution is to fund secular schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Do that for 40 years and you'll end religion's stranglehold.
It depends what you're referring to at the time as to whether or not you should capitalise the word "god". Grammar has nothing to do with you personal beliefs.
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.
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
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