How would you respond to this? For comparison the percentage of Americans who identify as atheist are around 3%, Christians are around 83%. So it seems atheists are greatly underrepresented among criminals, and Christians are only slightly underrepresented. Why would this be?
Atheists less criminal than Christians?
Henry Bell
Dominic Martin
less atheists than christians in general
let’s see that stat adjusted for the population sizes
Gabriel Hill
I'd wager it's because religion is part of the ghetto lifestyle, while most atheists are middle class and upper middle class people with no sense of community.
Josiah Watson
I sort of addressed that in OP.
Hunter Parker
First of all, getting religion is a good way to get past the parole board. There's a lot of "false" conversion in prison.
Second, most of them are referring to culturally, not mentally Christian. They've never read the bible etc.
Finally, atheism is pushed heavily by academia. The uneducated generally default to "yeah, Christian, I guess" when pressed because they've literally never thought about it. On the other hand, the people who self-declare as atheists probably have some college which, in itself, is very negatively correlated with crime.
If you changed the question to percentage of inmates that, when free before incarceration, went to church or attended some sort of bible study, you'd see that it was 99% don't (I mean, I made the 99% up but I've met a number of criminals and not one regularly attended church -before- incarceration).
Jaxon Morris
That's because there are many Christian Niggers
Jason Sanchez
Your kidding yourself, It would be at least 10%
Zachary Baker
Those who actually use the label atheist are around 3%, those who don't believe in God are around 9%. But whichever number you use there is still a proportionately much smaller number of them in prison.
Tyler Harris
1st What year does that chart date from?
And 2nd>>627368.
With a dose of, I can say I'm a helicopter does that make me a helicopter?
3rd question the presumption that being christian makes one a criminal
William Long
Pretty much this.
No, it's less, for exactly the same reason that not nearly all of that 83% are really Christian.
Matthew Wright
I looked it up and it is pretty old (1997).
liveleak.com
I don't know if there are more recent stats.
Nathan Wilson
Still quite low apparently.
patheos.com
Henry Hughes
Jesse Lee Peterson says those niggers are not Christian. I agree.
Jace Parker
This
and OP is retarded if he thinks that just admitting the fact that there are fewer atheist than Christians in general means he doesn't have to answer the objection.
David Robinson
I'm not sure how you're not getting this. If 3% (or 9%, either way) of Americans are atheists, and only 0.209% (or 0.1% by the more recent data I linked later in the thread) of prisoners are atheists, then atheists are dramatically underrepresented among prisoners. How are you calling me a retard when it seems like you didn't even read the OP (even after I already told someone I addressed this in the OP)? I'm a Christian btw, I'm not some atheist trying to play gotcha.
Jose Watson
Most catholic churches near a correctional facility will have a prison ministry program. Why don’t you ask at your local Catholic church to get an idea of what your local statistics are like? I’m on the East Coast of the United States my churches prison ministry program has about six people out of 300 show up for religious counseling.
Liam James
Hate to go Zig Forums on you but religion isn't the only factor to consider. There's race, age, gender etc.
What you would need to do is perform a regression analysis on the data to determine two things:
1) What are the most prominent factors
2) Once all major factors are accounted for, how likely is religion (e.g. within the white demographic, what is the religiosity of the inmates)
Noah Hill
lrn2meaningfulStatistics
Easy when you think about it.
Landon Walker
Separate by race.
Isaac Gutierrez
Nice try Zig Forums
Nathan Green
1. Catholic is the religion of Hispanics and.. people in Louisiana. That's about it though.
2. Orthodox is low. HAH!
Josiah Smith
Catholic Latinos, actually.
Jack Martin
Not in the US they're not (not in large enough numbers to justify the claim made by this guy), and that's where OP's stats are from
This doesn't need to be debated. I was only (((you)))-ing the Zig Forums user
Christopher Martinez
...
Adam Torres
I don't care about your theories. I want to see the numbers separated by race.
Christopher Wright
Yeah most latinos in the U.S are mestizos, pardo, or castizo.
Levi White
True, but Hispanics in the north-east tend to have a lot of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, both of whom tend to be tri-racial, Dominicans are tri-racial but their black genes are so strong that the just pass off as mulatto, i've observed that Puerto Ricans are a bit less black than Dominicans.
Hispanics are the worst though, they claim to be ultra Catholic then they go and vote like heretics. When one looks at how minority Catholics vote, and how white Catholic vote, there is a clear distinction.
Race matters a lot.
Anthony Evans
>Not understanding that despite Hispanics and blacks are more religious than whites, ethnic identity prevails against all since American politics and society is extremely racialized and you have to be a literal idiot to ignore that climate
I guarantee if Republicans stopped conflating conservative values with white identity (as if minorities can't be conservative or religious) then the majority of Latinos and Blacks would vote Republican. It's really that simple.
However, both sides are racebaiters and Americans excel in racebaiting and racial shitposting so this will never happen. It's a sick country.
Also,
No one in South America thinks this shit. Leave your one-drop rule somewhere else.
Aiden Wood
I know a black Catholic. Has 8 or so kids, all devoted Catholics. Nice family.
Robert Cooper
Why? Do you believe only White people can be Christian?
Luis Ross
Poor people do crimes
Christian's are generally poor
Poor are the blessed in spirit amen
Kevin Perry
Well, I’m not sure if it’s still a good justification for committing crimes…
Owen Jackson
Here’s what’s actually interesting about any of this: a Christian committing a crime is a person not living in conformity with their belief system, so is an atheist not committing a crime.
Christianity’s moral demands are the foundation of any criminal or civil law (don’t steal, lie, cheat, kill, harm). When a Christian commits a crime, it’s not as if he’s doing what his religion teaches him to do; he is doing the opposite and is not living in conformity with the teaching of his religion.
However, atheism is based on the foundational concept of the non-existence of objective truth and thus, the non-existence of any objective moral standard. Therefore, when an atheist lives a life in conformity with criminal and civil laws which themselves are rooted in objective moral standards, that atheist is living contrary to his “religion.”
So who cares why more Christians commit crime than atheist. The real question is, why does any atheist live a law abiding life?
Maybe it’s because they don’t really believe what they believe (nihilism).
Grayson Barnes
If you're implying that christians are more violent, then they aren't. If you've looked at the atheist prime ministers of North Korea, Poland, and the USSR, then they killed more people than Christians did.
David Richardson
This. Blacks has disproportionate rates of criminality and "religiousness."
Brandon Thompson
*have
Nolan Garcia
Anyone that tries to use polls to validate or invalidate a belief is using an appeal to popularity fallacy and you can safely stop their agument into the dust and ealk away.
That said, Catholics preach hard to inmates. Inmates like feeling good about themselves or trying to seem less evil by claiming to be religious. It's sort of a big thing.
Also there's just less atheists. You could always retort with the number of deaths atheist dictators in the 20th century alone and murderers have amounted compared to similar religious wackos. I.E. Stalin, Jeffery Dalmer, David Koresh, David Roland, etc. Atheists know no one trusts them, they don't trust each other, it's a fact. Because everyone knows rejection of any founding principles in favor of community virtues and hedonism allows for moral corruption. Basic stuff really.
Wyatt Gutierrez
not that correlation was debunked long ago?
Samuel Edwards
It's more that if atheists are less likely to be criminals than Christians, it goes against the argument that Christianity helps people to stay moral. It doesn't really have to do with whether it's true or not, just how beneficial it is to society.
Addressed in the OP. It's not that there are a low raw number of atheist criminals, but that the percentage of criminals who are atheists is much lower than the percentage of society as a whole who are atheists.
I am a Christian by the way. Just trying to get a handle on an argument I saw an atheist make (about how beneficial Christianity is here in the material realm, not about whether it is true).
Lincoln Garcia
When you bombard people with (atheist) propaganda you will see them adapt to it, some less than others. Conforming to (atheist) propaganda is a form of over-socialization, and criminals generally are under-socialized, whereas middle-class academia is generally over-socialized. Thus one group brands itself as "Christian" - even though crime is explicitly un-Christian - the other as "atheist".
I bet if you investigated the preference for avocado in the prison population you would also find it significantly lower than in the general population.
Connor Powell
Christians commit crimes because they can be forgiven after the fact I suppose.
Xavier Allen
Atheist don't commit crimes because they are bourgeois afraid of everything. Stuck in their hedonistic way of life death is the final end for them, the absolute horror. A christian don't care, he know life is temporary, he can be edgy.
Jose Howard
Atheist crime stats are helped by the fact that we've legalized sodomy.
Blake Edwards
Because about 90% of lawyers here in the south like to say "but this dude who robed the liquor store, sold crack, raped half the townswomen, sacked Rome, and littered is a good Christian." They think that it will win over the jury, but it never does for obvious reasons.
Thomas Myers
No it really isn't. Look at most of the court records down here. Truth is, everyone knows atheist tend to be crap, so lawyers never try to make the "he's a good atheist" argument.
Joshua Torres
This.
Imagine if Mugabe was anti-sodomy and anti-abortion, and his pro-white opposition was pro- those things. Whom would you vote for?
Blake Gomez
You have to consider that these statistics don’t take into account how many of these inmates go into prison with these belief systems. It just looks like they took a poll of what inmates believed without seeing how many converted in prison (which is probably a sizeable amount considering the amount of ministry done in prisons by local churches). If an atheist is saying that Christians commit more crimes then that can’t be proven by these statistics. If anything it shows that there is powerful ministry happening in prisons and the inmates (after losing everything) have to search for what really matters.