Religious statistics in the U.S.
I've known for some time that Christians are more likely to be in jail than atheists (by roughly 10%) but I've come across some other statistics today, all taken from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health.
As well as being less likely to be in jail at all, atheists were most likely out of any religious group (not that they're really a religious group but I'll refer to them as such to make life easier) to be serving sentences of less than 12 months, meaning the crimes they do commit are less serious.
Divorce statistics show that Jews and Christians of all denominations are more likely to divorce than atheists (Jews 30%, Christians 24-27% depending on type of Christian, Atheists 21%)
Atheists seem to make more money as well. The average annual income for atheists is $33k, whereas the Christian is around $29k. Other interesting ones are Jews, the highest income at $36,700, and Jehovah's Witnesses with the lowest at $21k.
More dramatic though, is this one UK statistic. Christians are a minority in the UK (around 40%) but are a majority in prison, at around 60% of the prison population.
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posted by SubJunk at
12:05
2 Comments:
From a statistical point of view, I think one must look at how the data is collected, and more importantly why people people supply certain answers.
If I page through the personnel files, the people wrote "Christian, Catholic, Presbytarian" etc. and after a quick search I cannot find one entry of "Atheist, none" etc.
The reason can be that when a person applies for a job, he or she is not likely to write "Atheist" there, for abvious reasons: The person is applying for a job and may think that being an atheist will reflect negatively upon him or her.
The data is merely collected so that the right person, priest etc. can be contacted if the person gets injured and is dying.
People in prison want to impress the parole board.
They can fear that claiming to be an atheist does not sound good.
They want to impress, tell the parole board they are now good citizens and are going to walk the narrow way. So they state they are Christians, even if they are not.
My 2 cents.
6seven8
By
Anonymous, at Tuesday, 17 October, 2006
For sure, good points (which have also been made on the scam.com forum recently)
It also raises other interesting things, such as I think it's pretty disgusting that Christians are thought of more favourably than atheists in America. We're supposed to be going towards equality, supposedly, but that's intolerance at it's worst.
I mean sure religious groups don't like people worshipping other gods, many times wars/slaughters have been started because of the "false idol" thing, but the bias against atheists is a league of it's own because it's not even a false idol, it's just no idol.
I don't think it's reasonable in any way to assume that just because someone is Christian they are more moral or less likely to re-offend than an atheist. That bias exists but I don't think it's accurate at all.
By
SubJunk, at Tuesday, 17 October, 2006
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