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The results of this study don’t even make sense.

The conclusion of this tax payer salaried horseshit study is that people who believe in hell commit less crime, but people who believe in heaven commit more crime.

This is like concluding a study with the extrapolation that “people who believe that butter leads to heart disease eat healthier, while the people who believe that eating less butter is ultimate rewarding eat unhealthy.

One only has to read the part where the “study” interviewed people from “all around the world” to understand where they’ve ridden off the rails. This renders the study completely useless in their effort to promote a Godless society.

CBS

Believing if you are on a “highway to hell” could impact whether or not if you commit a crime.

A study published in the scientific journal PLoS One by University of Oregon’s Azim Shariff and University of Kansas’s Mijke Rhemtulla finds that people who believe in hell are less likely to commit a crime while people who believe in heaven more likely are to get in trouble with the law.

The two professors collected data for belief in hell, heaven and God from the World and European Values Surveys that were conducted between 1981 until 2007 with 143,197 participants based in 67 countries. They compared the data to the mean standardized crime rate in those countries based on homicides, robberies, rapes, kidnappings, assaults, thefts, auto thefts, drug crimes, burglaries and human trafficking.

I may not be a professor, but shouldn’t they ask people in prisons if they believe in heaven or hell, neither or both?

Why traverse the globe to ask random people their beliefs, only to conclude that the people who believe in heaven are the problem?  (I think we know the answer.)

Perhaps they could have also asked the prisoners if they believed in heaven before they were caught committing their crimes. T(here are plenty of devout people in prison, finding that old time religion the moment the iron door slammed.)

It seems the pointy-headed professors also missed the possibility that areas with high crime could have a majority of  the people praying to God, hoping for a better fate awaiting them in heaven, while a minority of the people are the ones committing the crimes.

The entire report is an insult to logic and reason.

I’ve reread the last part of this CBS story about 5 times and I still have no idea what they are talking about. I don’t think CBS does either. They published it because it slams religion. That’s good enough for them.

“[R]ates of belief in heaven and hell had significant, unique, and opposing effects on crime rates,” Shariff and Rhemtulla found in the study. “Belief in hell predicted lower crime rates … whereas belief in heaven predicted higher crime rates.”

They also found that a recent social psychological experiment found that Christian participants who believe in a forgiving God gave themselves more money for the study.

“Participants in the punishing God and both human conditions overpaid themselves less than 50 cents more than what they deserved for their anagrams, and did not statistically differ from the neutral condition, those who wrote about a forgiving God overpaid themselves significantly more-nearly two dollars,” the study found.

Shariff and Rhemtulla believe that the study raises “important questions about the potential impact of religious beliefs on global crime.”

What are they yammering about?