(September 14, 2010 at 4:51 pm)Watson Wrote: Most of the atheists I have come across are very ehtical, moral individuals. They are very strict about upholding this framework, which is obviously a good thing. So while it doesn't surprise me if there are less atheists in prison, I too doubt this studdy. For one, by ratio wouldn't less atheists be in prison? Less atheists exist. So proportionally it is pretty accurate to assume that, given a smaller number of atheists throughout the world, there will be a smaller number of atheists in prison as compared to religious folk.
The information is done as percentage though!
For instance,
If say, 30% of the population of country X are of religion Y. You would expect the prison population of country X to be around 30% religion Y. If however, people who follow religion Y are only 1% of the population of the prison, then it's something to think about.
So in the actual case im making a fairly large chunk, say a fifth of the general population of the UK are atheist... you would expect about a fifth of the prison population to be Atheist. But it's not, only 1% of the prison population are saying their Atheist or Agnostic, but a MUCH higher percentage of the general population are saying they are Atheist or Agnostic.
Correlation obviously dosen't mean causation but it's interesting.
