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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.
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...
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'?
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
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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