Less crime if you believe in Hell?

"Belief in hell keeps down criminal activity, but belief in heaven actually boosts it, according to a pair of researchers at the universities of Oregon and Kansas.

Azim Shariff and Mijke Rhemtulla scoured 30 years of international values-based surveys and found societies that put more stock in supernatural benevolence than supernatural punishment have higher national crime rates. The relationship is so significant, they found, that it is a stronger predictor of crime rates than are economic factors such as gross domestic product and income equality."


The Globe and Mail, Jun. 25 2012

I understood immediately that there were issues with this research. Comparing crime statistics between countries, when crime is reported differently makes no sense at all. I may be prejudiced but I my first thought was that belief in Hell correlates with poor crime statistics. I might as well post the graph right away (which is picked up from Epiphenom which also has a critical article):

It's a bit hard to read with only two letters abbreviations but you can see that Norway (NO) and Sweden (SE) are ranking high here. Yes, I live in one of the most crime infested countries. I wish I lived in Egypt (EG) which you will see on the bottom.

Here's a critical examination:

"Interpol merely gathers and reports nonlethal crime statistics provided by member nations without standardizing or vetting it ^{[19, 22]}. For example, assaults are reported at a rate about 6 times higher in Australia and Sweden than in Canada and France, this level of disparity is suspect. Rates of theft are reported to be twice as high in Sweden as in France; are the former actually twice as larcenous as the French, or are the latter twice as unlikely to file a report, or is the reality somewhere in-between? Similarly suspicious discrepancies exist in International Crime Victims Survey results. Reported rates of rape are two to twenty times higher in the U.S. than in other 1st world nations ^[24,25], but this only means that American females report being raped at far higher rates, not that American males are more prone to committing sexual assaults. Nonlethal crimes are difficult to compare even between the relatively uniform 1st world countries, they only grow worse when comparing 2nd and 3rd world nations with greater disparities between the quality of crime reporting."

Plosone.org, GregorySPaul on 24 Jun 2012

 The only statistic you can reliably compare is homicide, but even there there are issues:

"In contrast, Jensen found that more homicide is more strongly linked to greater popular support for the reality of hell than for heaven [12] -- he suggests that “malevolent” forms of religion produce inferior results compared to “benevolent” -- Sharif and Rhemtulla do not cite Jensen or explain the disparity in their results with his. Sharif and Rhemtulla find that more homicide weakly correlates with more belief in God, Rees [5] as well as Jensen [12] found a positive relationship in a large sample of nations. In the more uniform prosperous democracies the only example with high levels of homicide, the U.S., has the highest levels of religiosity including belief in heaven and hell [6]. The advanced democracies with the least, and remarkably low, homicide are the most atheistic. (It would be interesting to analyze correlations between measures of religiosity and homicide in different economic categories of nations.) Potential reasons that deity worship and scripture contribute to lethal violence have been proffered [6-8,13-15].
How crime in general corresponds to differing levels and types of religiosity remains inherently uncertain, but the most atheistic democracies appear to suffer relatively modest nonlethal misdemeanors and felonies, and definitely enjoy very low lethal violence. All studies agree that the most reliably measured crime, homicide, tends to be higher in less atheistic countries. Studies are contradictory regarding how homicide correlates with differing belief beliefs in the afterlife, further analysis may clear this up."

In short: Bollocks.

Anglo-Saxon attitudes

The March 29th issue of The Economist had some interesting charts showing how Britons and Americans differ on several issues:

It's not surprising how many believes in God and Hell and attitudes to Atheist presidents, but I thought it was interesting to see the differences on Creationism and Intelligent Design in USA. That 20 per cent of Americans believe in Intelligent Design while 40 per cent of them believe in "The Bible" is in a sense good news, because it just shows that the problem is a lack of basic education. Intelligent Design is in many ways more insidious, while the bible version is much more primitive. I think good education stand a better chance with Creationism than with Intelligent Design, because ID is stupidity on a much more abstract level disguising itself as science. You also see that in Britain, there's slightly more people who believe in ID than Creationism.


As for values, the only place they seem to concur is about death penalty.



This chart is a bit difficult to read, but I think it's a summary of how they responded in the other charts after party lines. Notice how even English Conservatives are much more liberal with regards to religion and values than American democrats.

Thoughts on the Afterlife Among U.S. Adults 50+

"To varying degrees, those surveyed say they believe in...

* God (94%)
* life after death (73%)
* the existence of spirits or ghosts (53%)
* heaven (86%) and hell (70%)

While 66 percent say their confidence in life after death has increased as they've gotten older, 20 percent report being frightened when considering what happens to them when they die. In examining the possible influences of afterlife beliefs and demographic variables, three factors emerge as most strongly related to fear of death:

* being somewhat religious (compared to “very religious” and “not at all religious”)
* believing that death is the end
* belief in the existence of hell

When gender, employment, age, education and marital status are taken into account, [low] income emerges as the only demographic factor significantly related to fear of death and as a strong predictor of being afraid to think about it."

AARP, June 2007

They also made a follow up:

"To begin, we found that people 50 and over tend to be downright conventional in their basic beliefs: nearly three quarters (73 percent) agree with the statement “I believe in life after death.” Women are a lot more likely to believe in an afterlife (80 percent) than men (64 percent).

[...]

Believers show general agreement over the choice of destinations in the afterlife, as well: 86 percent say there’s a Heaven, while somewhat fewer (70 percent) believe in Hell.

[...]

A lot believe there will be sex in the afterlife,

[...]

[T]he richer people are, the less likely they are to believe there’s a Heaven. Among those with a household income of $75,000 or more per year, 78 percent believe in Heaven—compared with 90 percent of those earning $25,000 or less. Similarly, 77 percent of college-educated people think there’s a Heaven, compared with 89 percent of those who have a high school diploma or less."

AARP, September & October 2007

More in the article (can't quote it all!.)

Most people on earth believe in reincarnation

"Most people of Planet Earth believe in reincarnation, the latest survey undertaken by the Gallup Institute says.

Meanwhile, according to the sociologist Prof. Jorg Stolz, director of l'Observatoire des Religions of the University of Lausanne, this tendency comes up as people's understanding of the supernatural gets increasingly blurred, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported Wednesday.

'If you ask people what they believe in, you may see that the more precise question about afterlife you ask, the fuzzier answers you get. For most people, even God is no longer their Father in Heaven but rather a supreme power uniting man, nature and cosmos,' he said.

According to Stoltz, the concept of hell also becomes increasingly unpopular. Only 5 to 10 percent of Europeans still believe it exists, he said."

Interfax, June 27 2007

Religion getting more warm and fuzzy!