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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.
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
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
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.
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.
I also do not like $LOCATION. Where's my funny points?
Almost every single sentence you've wrote is wrong as far as I can tell. See Zuckerman's paper I referenced earlier for a very long list of references showing that crime is not reduced by religiosity. There are complicating factors (for example, in a worse off society people may be more inclined to turn to religion) but your claim that there are "numerous studies" backing up this sort of position is simply false. Moreover, if this sort of claim were at all true then one would expect Sweden to be in absolutely awful shape since it is even less religious than Russia and China, yet Sweden is extremely well off.
As to your claim about philosophy, many prominent philosophers, such as Kant, Bentham, and Rahls would disagree. All three would see humans as having innate instincts for moral good. And in fact, studies have shown that many mammals will instinctively help other members of their species even when they have not encountered them before. For example, when another rat is hurt or trapped, nearby rats will help free them http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2011/12/08/helping-your-fellow-rat-rodents-show-empathy-driven-behavior. The instincts for basic moral behavior run deep.
At a temporal level, the claim is also questionable. It is pretty clear that over time, religiosity has gone down. But over the last few hundred years, the overall violence level when measured by the percentage of the population that dies violent deaths has gone down. There's an excellent book about the decline of violence among humans, The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker, which I strongly recommend.
By the way, the first major proponent for National atheism is Carl Marx. This is something to think very strongly about, though I very much doubt that people will do so even after reading that statement.
Ok. So first of all, his name was "Karl". Second, the that's just not true. Marx was born in 1818, when the French revolution was already over. During the French Revolution, major proponents of atheism included Jacques Hébert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_H%C3%A9bert and Chaumette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gaspard_Chaumette. Curiously, the bloody Robespierre strongly favored deism. But let's pretend that your claim was true for a moment and that Karl Marx really had been the first proponent of national atheism. Would this matter? Not really. This is in essence the genetic fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy- who comes up with an idea doesn't impact whether the idea is valid. For example, the mathematician John Nashh is schizophrenic- that doesn't make his math incorrect. And even if the genetic fallacy were valid, Marx's idea of national atheism, a forced destruction of religion, is extremely different than a secular society that simply doesn't care much about religion, (like say Sweden).
BZZZZ! WRONG!. On all accounts, but that is not surprising. There is a strong correlation between education level and religiosity. The less education one have, the more religious one tends to be. The correlation is particularly strong in hard sciences.
The most atheistic countries in the world are probably the Scandinavian countries and some of the Benelux countries. These all have significantly lower crime rates than the countries where religion has a more prominant position. If you look at the US and The Netherlands for example, it is interesting to see that the religious US has higher crime rate, higher divorce rate, higher teen pregnancy rate, more children born out of wedlock etc, than the rather atheist Netherlands. Oh, and the Dutch also have a more libereal drug legislation. So, comparing the US and and Netherlands less religion and more drugs leads to less crime, less divorce and in general more "moral" behavior as determined by the traditional Christian "moral code".
Guess what happens to people with no moral guide lines?
What a childish and inane statement. Shows a serious lack of brains right there. Moral guidelines have nothing to do with religion. Adults, as opposed to sniveling children, don't need a big bogey man behind the door to scare them into moral behavior. Thinking adults can actually act morally based on philosophy or self-interest. Please grow up. Santa doesn't exist. There is no God. stop using a divine entity as an excuse for inexcusable behavior. It is inexcusable to be unable to device a set of moral rules without the scary bogeyman forcing you to.
Oh, and if you want to take moral guildelines from someone, the Abrahamic God is the last place to look. That dude is a shitbag and deserves only contempt. Even the idea of a divine entity demanding a loyal subject murder his oldest son for him is abhorrent. If God stepped down tomorrow and asked of me what he asked of Abraham, I would spit him in the face. If he continued his insane demands I would have him comitted or I would slay him. You see, slaying divine entities is easy.