A 1999 Gallup poll asked Americans if they would vote for an otherwise qualified Presidential candidate who belonged to certain ethnic or religous groups. Here are the results:
For Whom Would Americans Vote?
(Gallup, 1999)
Woman : 95%
Roman Catholic : 94%
Baptist : 94%
Black : 92%
Jew : 92%
Mormon : 79%
Homosexual : 59%
Atheist : 49%
There are 29 million Americans who describe themselves as nonreligious, secular, atheist, or agnostic, outnumbering Jews tenfold, and all other religions except Christianity by an even larger margin.
Chew on that for a moment.
Now: are Americans justified in their fear of atheists? Do atheists commit more crimes? Here are the statistics on US federal prison inmates, from the Federal Bureau of Prisons:
All Judeo-Christian religions: 62594 inmates, 83.761% of population
(This includes Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc.)
Atheists: 156 inmates, 0.209% of population
Click here for full results.
How about that! Atheists compose roughly 10% of the population, but only 0.21% of the prison inmates.
Here's an interesting academic paper. It shows that for major industrialized countries, increased belief in God is linked to:
-Higher death rate for infants and children under 5
-Lower life expectancy
-Higher abortion rate
-Higher teen pregnancy rate
There is also some positive correlation between belief in God, higher homicide rate, and higher STD infection rates, but the USA is so much higher than everyone else that it's hard to see the rest of the graph.
You can check the charts at the end yourself:
Link to Creighton study
This should make it abundantly clear that religion, not atheism, is associated with crime and societal problems.
No, correlation is not causation. We can't say for certain that religion actually causes child mortality and lower life expectancy. But it's clear that the opposite is not true, no matter how many religious Americans shout and point fingers.
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