[url=http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-atheists-make-85-percent-americas-scientists-and-07-percent-its-prison]Within the United States Federal Prison system, 0.07% of inmates are Atheist[/url]
The reason I am posting this is because of the stereotype [u]Atheist have no morals because there is no God to hold them accountable for their actions.[/u]
If the stereotype was true, that number should be much higher than 0.07%.
My main point with this, i[b]t doesn't matter what your belief system is because belief systems don't necessarily correlate with morals.[/b] This isn't a knock against theist just trying to shed some light on really negative assumptions.
Sidenote: I see some Christians/Catholics saying that prisoners aren't real Theist. To those that have this view i ask you:[spoiler]1) Who are you to decide what a good Christian/Catholic/etc is? Isn't God the only one who would know and your just giving your opinion?
2) Aren't all sins equal, from white lies to genocide? [u](In context of religion not law[/u]) So if all sins are equal doesn't that make them just as real as you?[/spoiler]
-
I for one never made that argument. The concept of morality itself is too ambiguous of a term to define objectively for statistical purposes. I too think that religion or lack of is merely what you make it. This is evidenced by the fact that there are good and bad people in every ideology and worldview, along with everything in between. That said however, your argument itself is a bit fallacious. For one, the assumption that incarceration rates are a good standard for judging morality by--which, in itself, is too ambiguous for statistical purposes--given that many people are framed, wrongly convicted, and/or guilty only of--for lack of a better term--"stupid" laws like the War on Drugs. That's not to mention the backgrounds of each of these individuals which may or may not mitigate their guilt to varying degrees, and the fact that many people who have committed the same crimes have not necessarily been incarcerated, given the unjustness of the system where money acts as a license to break the law. Just some things to think about. And then there is the fact that your statistics do not account for the amount of prisoners who converted *after* committing their crime, and therefore weren't under the guidance of their newfound religion at the time they were criminals. And then there is the fact that this only accounts for the United States and at a particular time. It does not account for the global population of religious and irreligious across the ages. In fact, I'd wager from a historical perspective that atheists have murdered more people than any individual religion ever has. The Marxist massacres perpetrated by atheistic despots and regimes of the 20th century have a higher body count than anything that was ever possible for religions prior to the advent of the industrial revolution. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong along have a combined bodycount ranging around 100 million. And that's not taking into account the atrocities that their regimes continued to carry out even after their deaths, as well as the atrocities of Cambodia, the Viet Cong, Fidel Castro & Che Guavara, and other secular regimes. To be blunt, it wasn't a religious group that put my Orthodox people in the gulags. It was your kind. Now, that's not to say that atheism produces bad people or that you need religion to be good, but just to point out how unreliable your statistical method was in light of history, as well as the whole notion of statistically examining something as ambiguous with so many factors like morality which can't possibly be examined objectively in a statistical context.