Atheists put their faith in ethical behavior
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CreateThis CreateT...@yippee.con
Fundies often lament that they wouldn't have any morals if G_d didn't dispense them. Who am I to argue? But they evidently don't speak for atheists.
I included the quote about the growth of 'nonreligious' Americans just to rub it in.
CT = = = = = = = = = = Atheists put their faith in ethical behavior By MELISSA FLETCHER STOELTJE San Antonio Express-News http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/living/religion/14121950.htm From the article: [...] A study done by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York found that the percentage of the population that describes itself as "nonreligious" more than doubled from 1990 to 2001, from 14.3 million to 29.4 million people. The only other group to show growth was Muslims.
[...] But what, exactly, do atheists believe in, if not in God?
In a nutshell, atheists believe in reason alone, in those things that can be arrived at through intellect and the scientific method. Concrete evidence for God, they argue, simply doesn't exist. They don't cotton to leaps of faith or anything that involves a supernatural being reaching into human lives. They believe you can live a happy, respectable life based on human ethics that were derived not from God handing down a tablet but from a code of rules that emerged naturally through an evolutionary process in which humans learned how to live together successfully.
"FiveLongYears" fivelongye...@aol.com
[.....] I wonder if there is a study, to show %'s of crime commited by Atheist, and religious groups.. Do more christians commit fraud? Do Islamics commit more murder? How do we atheists rank in there. DON'T take that to mean that I'm including Atheism as a religion, I'm not.
I'm just curious to see how much a lack of belif in God, contributes to lawful behaviour.. if at all.. mmmmm If a lack of belief in God makes us not have morals, then prove it.
Show me numbers.. FLY
CreateThis CreateT...@yippee.con
Somebody posted something about that recently. I think it was that the number of atheists in jail was disproportionately low (but maybe jail is like foxholes).
Obviously, fundies can only speak for themselves about that. I'll take their word that they have no morals of their own.
CT
"Denis Loubet" dlou...@io.com
Well, prison statistics show a drastic difference in the proportion of atheists in prison compared to the proportion of atheists in society. In 1997 the proportion of Atheists in prison was .209 percent of the prison population. Yet atheists comprised anywhere from 8 to 16 percent in society at large.
Now, that could mean that atheists commit less crimes, and thus are more moral, or it could mean that atheists get away with more cirmes, and thus are more clever. Either way, atheists win. ;-)
--
Denis Loubet dlou...@io.com http://www.io.com/~dloubet http://www.ashenempires.com
"Robert Carnegie" rja.carne...@excite.com
What, atheists are taller, as well? ;-) I don't want to reproach this, but atheism doesn't have to be that way.
I'd allow supernatural belief to atheists, and apparently a great proportion of the American population honestly believes in angels...
not god, just angels. And then there are probably some folks who just haven't thought about it very much.
Of course the other common belief of atheists is in the overthrow of the capitalist state in order to establish communism :-)
cactus b...@nonespam.com
That last sentence is utter nonsense. You were joking, right?
"Robert Carnegie" rja.carne...@excite.com
Oh, yes. The simultaneous collapse of world communism and Amercan atheism is only coincidence ;-)
CreateThis CreateT...@yippee.con
Well, taller than we were in 1990.
That's not a belief; that's a future fact.
CT
Nancy Norton nos...@nospam.net
There's always this study: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html It shows a correlation between indications of societal health and how secular that society is. More secular countries have lower rates of things like homicides, suicides, etc. than more religious countries.
"Wakboth" Wakboth2...@yahoo.com
Nancy Norton kirjoitti: Maybe people living in more unstable societies turn more to religion as a relief?
-- Wakboth
er ...@swva.net
Fundies don't believe in numbers. It smacks of evidence.
Eric Root
"Greg G." ggw...@gmail.com
Apparently, it's just a box to check on a processing form. The .2% are simply those who prefer to remain in their cell an extra hour on Sundays.
Or maybe the police don't take atheists alive.
--
Greg G.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb denying enforcement of the vote.
"Gordon Hill" gor...@explainer.com
Could it be that athiests get religion on the way to prison?
GH
Nancy Norton nos...@nospam.net
I'm not sure that any of the countries in the study qualify as "unstable". The title of the article is "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies." The countries that are compared are: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Austria, Spain, Italy, United States, Sweden, and New Zealand.
Is the United States significantly more unstable than England?
Are the southern and mid-western areas of the US more unstable than the northeast? A quote from the article: "There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002)."
"bastiaan" bastiaan.vandew...@gmail.com
I can only speak for my own country (and the ones around it) but it's fairly obvious that people from the Islamic faith make up a disproportionate percentage of prison polulations, even if we take into account the fact that many of them are (2nd or 3rd generation) immigrants who tend to fill in the lower echolons of society and thus are more likely to end up in crime as well.
Now I could be mistaken but the Islamic pixie in the sky is no less cruel than his Baptist or Catholic counterpart when it comes to dealing with sinners. So religion didn't really help them to keep on that straight and narrow path. (As a side note: of course, religious folk sometimes do some of the most herrendous things to please their sky pixies.)
"Greg G." ggw...@gmail.com
Could be. Republicans seem to get it between the guilty plea and the sentencing.
--
Greg G.
You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.
--Vicomte de Chateaubriand
unrestrained_h ...@hotmail.com
<snip> 'Tis true, alas, and therefore skews the results to an unknown degree.
I think that atheists in the US are still less likely to commit crimes, but I'm not sure if I have the so-called "change of heart" properly measured. There are several confounding processes: 1. Some non-religious people are just not-concerned, and as they get older, or get in trouble, they embrace the religion of their childhood.
2. When I was in the US Army, Sunday morning in basic training I had the choice of going to church or polishing my boots. But surely in US prisons they are not so hostile to the non-religious, are they?
3. How many wardens are Pentecostal or Baptist?
4. My wife works in a medium security prison, and she says the prisoners are disproportionately Pagan there. She is of the impression that they have the coolest holidays, and get some privileges that others don''t. Muslims, for example, get the "privilege" of ham and eggs without the ham. Baptists get to pray. Pagans...
5. Years earlier, when she joined the army, they asked her what her religion was, and she said she didn't have any. So they stamped her dog tags "Protestant". Heh. Who answers the surveys regarding prison population - the prisoners, or the prison staff from prisoner records?
As a former fundie, I suspect that they are better people than they realize. Most folks internalize their family & culture's morals by adulthood. But fundamentalists are notorious for lacking introspective abilities. One consequence is that they genuinely think that they behave only because of a fear of eternal torture. Most are better than that.
Maybe not some folks who post here on a regular basis.
Kermit
"coaster" coaster...@gmail.com
The same is true of African Americans and Native Americans in the United States suggesting that wide spread anti-social behavior is the the result of discrimination, not religious belief.
"jgris ...@scu.k12.ca.us" <jgris
Over the same period, U.S. population grew from 270 million to 297 million, mostly by immigration. So the Muslims and atheists originate outside the country.
Money, drugs, pornography, gambling, homosexuality, and anything funded by organized crime.
Yeah, Money, drugs, pornography, gambling, homosexuality, and anything funded by organized crime. (What?) In other words, Nothing is so big or so bad, it can't be ignored.
The best trick the Devil can do is pretend he doesn't exist.
Oh, sure! Survival of the fittest! Let's just line up the weak, the infirm, the old and the disliked and systematically kill them off.
That's pretty much how we've managed to get along, so far. You ever wonder which Moslems end up dead after a spontaneous riot? The weak?
The infirm? The old? The pain in the ***, Uncle Ahmed, maybe? Every society has done it.
There's nothing naturally ethical about humans. Most of us, just don't want to be victimized by the police, the Justice system and the bureaucracy. That's not ethics, it's a marginal and realistic fear of the State... of being caught, embarr***ed and punished. When law enforcement lapses, you have stealing, killing and rioting... that's how ethical people truly are.
JTG 3/20/06
"SRNissen" soren.nis...@gmail.com
When I were atheist, I didn't think legalized drugs, pornography, gambling and homosexuality would be a bad thing, but it's wrong to say that I "believed" in them.Vis a vis "money," I were, and still am, socialist. It seems to me that all the richest men on the earth are christians and muslems.
Where do you get the organized crime bit from?
Nothing so absolutely without proof as that which other people refuse to tell you how to find.
Of course, the best trick the church ever pulled was convincing people that there is a devil, and donations towards the church will save you from him.
Sorry, what? That's not "survival of the fittest", that's "Survival of those with the most ***holes on their side." See, that may be how your ethics work. I will not say to you "liar" when you tell me that you are an evil person. However, my experience with atheists have generally been that they are nice, ethical people, who do altruistic things without expectation of reward.
- SRNissen
CreateThis CreateT...@yippee.con
Don't forget poverty, lack of education, insularity...
And none of these disqualify religion as a cause. Remember that we're responding to the often-made claim that religion is *the* source for morals and atheism is a moral vacuum. So these stats are really only speaking to that comparison.
CT
Jeffrey Turner jtur...@localnet.com
So what explains embezzlement and securities fraud? People who steal $500 get 3-5 years, people who steal $500 million get six months.
--Jeff
--
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems. --Mohandas Gandhi
CreateThis CreateT...@yippee.con
Beats the Crusades and the Inquisition.
You're thinking of creationists and science.
He's not pretending.
WTF? You usually sound mostly sane.
OK, I accept that you religious guys simply won't act morally unless you're promised eternity in paradise and threatened with eternity in flames.
But you guys are obviously of a higher immoral cl***. Most of us will act right for a much more modest price. We'll do it simply for a better life here on Earth and to avoid social chaos. All you have to do is teach us about *that* from birth rather than brainwashing us with your supernatural S&M fantasies.
CT
CreateThis CreateT...@yippee.con
$500 will only buy a good lawyer for an hour.
CT
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