Hello, Anyone interested in a debate?

[nihilistcat]

Hello everyone;

I am interested in setting up a debate with someone regarding the need of an imaginary friend for morality.  Please let me know if anyone is interested in participating in this debate in accordance with the rules specified.  Thank you.

Well, I do have a simple question (considering we're talking about the need for a deity to instill or incentivize morality).

Atheists are the least represented group in our prison population, and this is a proportional statement e.g. atheists only make up ~0.07% of our prison population, while comprising anywhere between 2.4 and 8% of the overall population (I'm fine with assuming the low number for the purposes of this thread). For comparison, Catholics make up ~24% of our prison population, while they only make up 22% of our overall population (and the percentage of protestants in our prisons is similarly consistent with their representation in the overall population). These numbers are taken from studies that used numbers from the US Department of Justice.

There are certainly some valid problems that we can find with these numbers, the most profound being the impact of institutional racism on the prison population.

However, even when we adjust the numbers to account for racial disparities, the percentage of atheists in prison (relative to the overall population of atheists) is still far lower than any other group (particularly Catholics and protestants). 

Likewise, atheists are the most educated segment of the population, they get divorced less, they're less likely to suffer from substance abuse issues, less likely to become pregnant as a teen, etc. Indeed, in virtually every metric that we commonly associate with "morality" ... atheists outperform the general population (again, particularly the Christian population). Even when we look at materialism, atheists tend to be far more left wing than the general population (your Pope Francis was a latecomer to our party), they're more likely to support taxation of wealth and public spending on social welfare programs, etc. 

So my question is ... what is it about atheism (in the context of the United States at least) that makes one "more moral" when compared to those who claim affiliation with the Christian faith? My hypothesis is selection bias (though I have no data to back it up). However, we might look at these numbers in the opposite way e.g. is it that atheism makes one more motivated to seek higher education, or does higher education make a person more predisposed to atheism? My guess is, it's the latter (although I admit, this is just anecdotal speculation).