UNCHARITABLE RELIGION

A few posts back I entered a letter to the editor I’d written about people using charity in order to spread their particular gospel. A thoroughly uncharitable thing to do; instead of pure charity, using money as a bribe to get into the door to belief. Now, coming out of tsunamiland, we read how Moslems and Christians are using people’s suffering as a way to spread their particular mythology to the devastated populations.


BUT HERE’S A WAY TO COUNTER THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WORLDWIDE


PRISON AND RELIGION

Have you ever wondered how many people in prison are religious? You’d think that the religious would be a small percentage of the general prison population. But, as anyone who knows could tell you, religion prepares many for a career in crime. Because feeling worthless and guilty and full of shame is quite likely to lead one to crime. In my own case, though never imprisoned, I was always at my worst when I felt that I needed to improve myself, judged others too harshly and felt that I was less than the next man. I thought many criminal thoughts. So I thank friends of mine for forwarding the following statistics:


[Open quote.] Prison Stats on Atheists

A letter in the November December 1997 issue of Free Mind asked for information on prison statistics concerning atheists. The author pointed out that, if religionists are correct that one cannot be moral without the Christian religion, then prisons should be full of atheists.

This is definitely not the case. The American Atheists Online News for July 8, 1997, offers many facts on the subject, a few of which I shall quote:

In The New Criminology, Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without. religious training is about one-tenth of 1 percent. W. T. Root, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and concluded, "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers were nearly absent from penitentiaries.

In Sing-Sing, of 1,553 inmates, 855 ( over half) were Catholics,18 Protestants, 117 Jews, and 8 nonreligious. During ten years in Sing Sing, of those executed for murder, 65 percent were Catholics, 26 percent Protestants, 6 percent Hebrew, 2 percent pagan, and less than .0033 percent nonreligious.

The Elmira, New York, reformatory system overshadowed all others, with nearly 31 ,000 inmates, of which 15,694 (or half) are Catholic, 10,968 are Protestant, 4,000 are Jews, 325 refuse to answer, and none report being an unbeliever.

Surveys of Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.

Dr. Christian, superintendent of the New York State reformatories, checked the records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only four college graduates, while 91 percent of the people listed in Who's Who are college graduates. Christian concluded that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living" and that "crime is the off- spring of superstition and ignorance."

These figures suggest that an in-depth study of survey results, published by the AHA, would be of interest to all readers and could contribute to countering the current drive to have "Christian" values taught in our public schools.

Jan Brazill

Colorado Springs, CO [Close quotes.]

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[Open quote.] The results of the Christians vs atheists in prison investigation.

By Rod Swift

I have expanded the figures to provide a % of the total respondents, and I have ranked them (they were presented to me alphabetically). These stats were obtained from their computer on 5 March 1997.

Dear Mr. Swift:

The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious affiliations of inmates. The following are total number of inmates per religion category:

Catholic 29267 39.164%

Protestant 26162 35.008%

Muslim 5435 7.273%

American Indian 2408 3.222%

Nation 1734 2.320%

Rasta 1485 1.987%

Jewish 1325 1.773%

Church of Christ 1303 1.744%

Pentecostal 1093 1.463%

Moorish 1066 1.426%

Buddhist 882 1.180%

Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%

Adventist 621 0.831%

Orthodox 375 0.502%

Mormon 298 0.399%

Scientology 190 0.254%

Atheist 156 0.209%

Hindu 119 0.159%

Santeria 117 0.157%

Sikh 14 0.019%

Bahai 9 0.012%

Krishna 7 0.009%

----------------------------

Total Known Responses 74731 100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this)

Unknown/No Answer 18381

----------------------------

Total Convicted 93112 80.259% (74731) prisoners' religion is known.

Held in Custody 3856 (not surveyed due to temporary custody)

----------------------------

Total In Prisons 96968

I hope that this information is helpful to you.

Sincerely,

Denise Golumbaski

Research Analyst

Federal Bureau of Prisons [Close quote.]

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[Open quote.] Now, let's just deal with the nasty Christian types, no?

Catholic 29267 39.164%

Protestant 26162 35.008%

Rasta 1485 1.987%

Jewish 1325 1.773%

Church of Christ 1303 1.744%

Pentecostal 1093 1.463%

Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%

Adventist 621 0.831%

Orthodox 375 0.502%

Mormon 298 0.399%

Judeo-Christian Total 62594 83.761% (of the 74731 total responses)

Total Known Responses 74731

Not unexpected as a result. Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%). [Close quote.]


Doesn't look too bad for us atheists and agnostics, does it? I've entered more than one post about jailhouse conversions to Jesus, noting that I think these people were made criminals by a culture overly influenced by misguided fundamentalists who abuse and shame everyone they come in cantact with.
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“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.” —Robert Louis Stevenson