Religion and Morals

Does one need religion to be moral? The argument that morals and religion are inseparable has long been a prominent fixture in the fundamentalist's play-book, so I thought I'd bring certain information to the attention of my readers. In 1997 the federal bureau of prisons compiled its data on religious affiliation within the prisons (source: Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst, Federal Bureau of Prisons, compiled from up-to-the-day figures on March 5th, 1997). That report found that .21% of prison inmates were atheists. I have heard it said that this percentage actually refers to non-religious people, which actually makes sense since the study does not appear to list either agnostics or non-religious people. In 2006, the Harris Interactive poll found that 4% of Americans considered themselves atheists, and 14% considered themselves agnostic, for a total of 18% non-religious (assuming there is no overlap), see harrisinteractive. Most studies have come up with similar numbers, for a list of those visit: freethoughpedia. I haven't thoroughly analyzed the data, but if we assume that most groups are proportionately represented (Christians do make up about 77% of inmates and the Pew Research Center found the percentage of Christians in America to be 76.5%, see pewforum) and we assume that the prison study actually only referred to atheists, then athiests are underrepresented in the prison population by a factor of nineteen! If we assume that the people referred to as atheists were actually simply non-religious, the number is even more staggering. If 18% of the population is non-religious, then they are underrepresented in prisons by a factor of 85! I don't know if I'm using the proper mathematical terminology, but what I mean is that you would have to multiply the number of non-religious people in prison by eighty-five for their number to proportionately represent the number of non-religious people in America.

This information is obviously interesting for several reasons. First, it indicates that a person's lack of religious faith makes it highly less likely that they will commit a crime. Of course one could argue that these numbers reflect only those people who were caught, meaning non-religious people commit just as much crime, they are merely 85 times better at not getting caught. That seems unlikely, but I could not disprove that argument. The numbers are also interesting because they seem to show that having religious faith has absolutely no impact on whether you are likely to commit a crime or not. This seems to controvert any claims by religious people that religion makes people more upstanding, if it did, they should be underrepresented in prisons. At the very least these numbers raise interesting questions. For a more in depth, and possibly controversial, analysis of these numbers and several other relevant statistics, go to http://www.skepticfiles.org/american/prison.htm. The following is an excerpt from that page:

"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 1/10 of 1%.  W. T. Root, professor of
psychology at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said
'Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding
that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers are absent from
penitentiariers or nearly so.'"