Does Jesus Cause Crime?

Terry Firma

Mar

12

2013

If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many ostensible Christians among the prison population, one answer is that Jesus Saves. If no one forgives you for the terrible things you’ve done, He will.

Even the most godless of criminals will often turn (quasi-)devout behind bars. It’s perfectly understandable. For starters, religion gives prisoners something to do. It also lets them become part of a righteous tribe. And no doubt, prayer and Bible study look good in the eyes of the warden and the parole board.

But most of all, religion can wash away evildoers’ guilt, if they feel any, and offer them a shot at salvation.

Christians think of redemption as a feature of their faith. But what if it’s a bug?

Too far?

Too far?

I ask because a new study in the academic journal Theoretical Criminology suggests that, instead of causing offenders to repent of their sins, religious programs might actually encourage crime. Slate reported on the interesting research the other day.

The authors of the study surveyed “hardcore street offenders” in and around Atlanta, and tried to gauge the effect that religion may have on the offenders’ behavior. Of the 48 subjects (admittedly a small sample), 45 claimed to be religious, and the researchers found that those followers

…seemed to go out of their way to reconcile their belief in God with their serious predatory offending. They frequently employed elaborate and creative rationalizations in the process and actively exploit religious doctrine to justify their crimes.

It should come as no surprise that street hoodlums who cloak themselves in religion don’t have much of a grasp of their professed faith’s basics. Take, for example, an 18-year-old robber whose nom de crime is Que:

Que: I believe in God and the Bible and stuff. I believe in Christmas, and uh, you know the commitments and what not.
Interviewer: You mean the Commandments?
Que: Yeah that. I believe in that.
Interviewer: Can you name any of them?
Que: Uhhh … well, I don’t know … like don’t steal, and uh, don’t cheat and shit like that. Uhmm … I can’t remember the rest.

This lack of knowledge is often a deliberate (if possibly subconscious) mental construct, a simple psychological crutch. Ignorance is bliss. As one enforcer for a drug gang asserted,

God has to forgive everyone, even if they don’t believe in him.

He had committed several murders, and obviously felt better knowing that salvation was potentially just a few prayers away. In fact, he believed that he was due God’s forgiveness even without penance or prayer.

A 23-year-old robber called Young Stunna thought that the circumstances of his upbringing, coupled with an appeal to Jesus, would pretty much justify his crimes:

Jesus know I ain’t have no choice, you know? He know I got a decent heart. He know I’m stuck in the hood and just doing what I gotta do to survive.

Young Stunna was typical. The 45 religious interviewees tended to shape their interpretation of their faith to make their criminal behavior seem less odious, less condemnable. Slate quotes a 25-year-old drug dealer called Cool, who believes that God not only doesn’t mind when you do bad things to bad people; the Almighty actually dispatches avengers like Cool to do His bidding:

If you doing some wrong to another bad person, like if I go rob a dope dealer or a molester or something, then it don’t count against me because it’s like I’m giving punishment to them for Jesus. That’s God’s will. Oh you molested some kids? Well now I’m [God] sending Cool over your house to get your ass.

Maybe Cool is right. The Lord (we are always told) works in mysterious ways.

But seriously: Atheists may see the study as an endorsement of their view that believing in God doesn’t equip people with a superior set of morals — the notion that’s the exact point of this site. However, the stars don’t all line up in our favor.

If what I wrote in the first couple of paragraphs is correct, then convicted prisoners will disproportionately and post-factum slather themselves in religious sauce. That being the case, the number that many atheists gleefully love to cite — that less than one percent of the prison population consists of atheists — does become almost meaningless. After all, hoodlums who never gave a fig about religion probably have a tendency to “get right with God” once they’re locked up. They were perhaps — and may still be, appearances to the contrary  — atheists, even if they never self-identified as such. That alone debunks the idea that there’s something more moral and law-abiding about atheists than about religionists. Fair’s fair.

Back to the study: The authors conclude that

There is reason to believe that these [criminals’ religion-based] rationalizations and justifications may play a criminogenic [crime-producing, TF] role in their decision-making.

Religion’s good intentions notwithstanding, that finding is another unpleasant reality that theists will have to come to terms with. The study doesn’t prove that, in Christopher Hitchens’ words, God is Not Great; but its conclusion does seem to support his maxim that “religion spoils everything.”

[image via memegenerator]

It Was a Good Day

Terry Firma

Mar

12

2013

Wow. Almost 2,000 page views in the past 24 hours. Not bad at all, considering we’ve only been at it for a few weeks. Thanks to everyone who dropped by, and a double thanks to those of you who dropped by and spread the word!

Site Stats ‹ Moral Compass — WordPress

Vatican: “You Can’t Trust a Catholic”

Terry Firma

Mar

11

2013

The Vatican’s papal conclave, a word that literally means “with key,”

…has long been obsessed with secrecy. The cardinals swear an oath to that effect before even entering the Sistine Chapel, punishable by excommunication. Anyone else associated with the election, from doctors and nurses to housekeeping staff, must also swear to never tell anyone anything they hear.

cardinal-on-phone

Now, what is such a sacred oath of secrecy, sworn to the Almighty, really worth? Bupkis, the Vatican acknowledges; there’s no honor among thieves gossips.

On Monday, jamming devices designed to block cellphone calls, Internet signals and hidden microphones were installed inside the Sistine Chapel and nearby guest residences. WiFi will be blocked throughout Vatican City until the end of the conclave. And the conclave’s active Twitter- and Facebook-users have been forbidden access to their accounts along with all other forms of communication with the outside world.

If such measures are truly necessary, it follows that at least some of the participants don’t particularly tremble at the prospect of excommunication.

Neither, clearly, do they fear God’s wrath.

Ergo: Nor should anyone else.

Egypt’s Forcible Conversions

Terry Firma

Mar

11

2013

What if this was your sister, daughter, neighbor, friend?

“Reports of Muslim men abducting and forcibly marrying and converting Coptic Christian women and girls have filtered out of Egypt with increasing frequency over the past decade,” noted a 2009 study. “These violations appear to be encouraged by the prevalence of cultural norms in Egypt often rooted in Islamic traditions that legitimize violence against women and non-Muslims.”

When it came out, the report, commissioned by Christian Solidarity International and the Coptic Foundation for Human Rights, and written by Michele Clark and Nadia Ghaly, was met with some skepticism — perhaps understandably so. Some of the abduction and forced-conversion claims were fraught with ambiguity. It seemed possible that young Christian women had simply been duped by the Muslim lotharios they’d run off with; the abduction allegations might have been a way to save face once regret set in.

Also, religious followers have never been shy about claiming discrimination and persecution at every turn. Christian wolf-crying to that effect is laughable (and counterproductive) when it occurs in the U.S., where three out of four Americans self-identify as Christians and there’s a church on every other street corner. Frankly, I don’t want to hear it.

But if, as atheists, we pride ourselves on our eye for reality, then selectively putting on blinders would be hypocritical. The actual persecution of religious minorities is surely as old as religion itself. Decent people everywhere, regardless of their God belief, should strongly oppose it. That includes non-theists. It’s inarguable that members of Christian minorities are routinely harassed and frequently assaulted — beaten, raped, murdered, burned out of their homes — in majority-Islamic societies, where such crimes often occur with the tacit approval of government and law enforcement.

So is there also something to the persistent reports of abductions and forcible conversions of Christian women in Egypt? A 2012 report by the same authors, Clark and Ghaly, makes an updated and much more convincing case, as does this news report from BBC TV:

Disturbing stuff.

Abduction, rape, and forced marriage are extremely nasty crimes to begin with. Together, they amount to life-long slavery. When they’re coupled with involuntary, often violent religious conversion, the outrage is compounded. It seems to me that such a violation of the mind can be just about as devastating to a victim’s self-worth as sexual violence.

It’s time that more news organizations and bloggers shine a light on this — and that the U.S. State Department begins demanding some changes from the Morsi government, before casually forking over another quarter of a billion dollars to a regime that’s been shown to either condone or support such crimes.

Hey Redditors (and Others)! Welcome!

Terry Firma

Mar

11

2013

This blog is seeing its visitor numbers jump hugely today, via both Reddit and Hemant Mehta’s site (The Friendly Atheist, hosted at Patheos.com). We’re thrilled!

If you like our content, please consider doing one of four things (or all four if you’re, you know, hardcore).

1. Join the Moral Compass page on Facebook (if that link doesn’t take you to the right place, search Facebook for “moralcompassmyfoot.”
2. Bookmark us in your browser(s).
3. Subscribe to our RSS feed (top right).
4. You can also subscribe to this blog by e-mail, so you’ll be notified of new posts as soon as they go live. Look for “Moral Compass by email” in the column on the right.

We’ll make it worth your while by, day after day, chronicling the misdeeds of the faithful, using stories culled from the news.

Write us at moralcompassblog AT gmail DOT com if you have editorial tips, questions, concerns, or complaints. We’ll listen.

Thanks!

The Gospel Truth

Terry Firma

Mar

10

2013

…brought to you by ace cartoonist David Horsey.

horsey_on_religion

Cleric: Babies Sans Burqas “Incite Male Senses”

Terry Firma

Mar

10

2013

Religion roundup:

• A Saudi cleric, Sheikh Abdullah Daoud, is calling for all Muslim baby girls to be covered with a veil or even a burqa. Daoud delivered a fatwa on the topic on Islamic al-Majd TV, stressing his belief that the veil would protect female babies from being sexually molested.

burqa-baby

• I guess the advice came too late for five-year-old Lama al-Ghamdi. She was recently raped and tortured to death by her own father, Saudi Arabian preacher Fayhan al-Ghamdi. Remarkably, he has been spared a death sentence or even a lengthy prison term after agreeing to pay “blood money” to the slain girl’s mother. According to a medical report, Lama had been tortured with whips, electric shocks, and an iron. She had broken arms, a broken back, and a fractured skull.

• Former New Birth Missionary Baptist members in Atlanta are suing Bishop Eddie Long. They allege that the megachurch pastor encouraged them to invest money in a Ponzi scheme despite the fact that he’d been told the investor was running a three-million-dollar capital deficit. SEC officials say that Long’s protégé, Ephren W. Taylor, promised to use investments for charity and to help economically challenged areas, but that Taylor instead diverted the funds to pay other investors, as well as personal expenses.

• Mehmet Şahin, who argued against the public praise given by young Turkish-Dutch Muslims to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, has received death threats. Subsequently, he and his family fled their home “for their safety,” on the advice of Arnhem mayor Pauline Krikke. After his televised disapproval of the anti-semitic remarks made by the teenagers, Dutch Muslims accused Şahin of being a Mossad agent. Residents of his primarily immigrant neighborhood circulated a petition to pressure Şahin into moving away permanently.

• A prominent Alabama clergyman, the Rev. Terry Greer, 54, made a brief court appearance on Thursday, after being charged with murder in the slaying of his 52-year-old wife and the attempted murder of their 18-year-old-daughter. Greer is senior pastor of the Gardendale-Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church near Birmingham.

[Image via freethoughtblogs]

The Inadvertent Truth?

Terry Firma

Mar

10

2013

Thank you, Joel Osteen, for providing a chuckle, however accidentally.

Osteen

Now stop hurting people!

Willfully Blind: Haredim Cover Up For God

Terry Firma

Mar

10

2013

When ultra-orthodox Israeli Jews, especially those of the Haredi sect, make the pilgrimage to the tomb of their revered Rabbi Nachman in Uman, Ukraine, they wish not to be subjected to the “evils and temptations” of the modern world.

So the most pious bring pieces of cardboard that they use to cover the movie screens in the airplane seats in front of them.

When this didn’t keep out all the possible bad influences, they resorted to using dark-colored scarves that they drape around their faces to block their peripheral vision — and sometimes a little bit more. Like so:

4106965030

I looked into the Haredim a little bit after encountering the photo below on Facebook the other day:

haredi_purim

Those are two Haredi Jewish women and their kids. The children are decked out in costumes especially for Purim, but the adults — the ladies, at least — dress like this whenever they show themselves in public. Modesty, they call it.

Naturally, when they take a bus, the Haredi men make them sit in the back. Sometimes the men try to force non-Haredi women into the rear section too.

Speaking of buses: Israeli transportation companies recently stopped running bus ads, because the billboards were always being vandalized by protesting Haredim, opposed as they are to photos of insufficiently-covered womenfolk.

Secular Israeli women and Western tourists are often yelled at when they enter Haredi neighborhoods, for not dressing modestly enough.

This culture war has been going on for decades — in the 1980s, ultra-Orthodox Jews bombed Tel Aviv-area newsstands that sold secular magazines and newspapers — but the Haredim have been getting stronger in number, and tensions have grown.

A big part of that is demographics: Haredi couples have an average of eight children, versus two kids for secular Israeli families. Of the country’s 5.4 million Jews, one million are already of the ultra-orthodox variety.

Most are shomer negiah (“observant of touch”), meaning they do not tolerate any physical contact with someone of the opposite sex, except immediate family. The men are especially wary of a woman’s cooties touch, including a handshake, as they consider a menstruating woman (a niddah) to be unclean. Unmarried women are regarded as being niddah by definition — always bleeding, always impure.

The Haredim are so offended by bare skin that they successfully campaigned for the removal of photos from the holocaust museum in Jerusalem, on the grounds that the nakedness of concentration-camp corpses was an intolerable affront to the religious eye.

It’s all perfectly perfectly quaint, or perfectly ludicrous — take your pick.

I’ll leave you with this dual image.

MuslimsJewish1

Considering how much these tribes have in common (including their misogyny), isn’t it mindboggling that fundamentalist Muslims have no greater desire than to see Jews massacred, and that fundamentalist Jews wish death and destruction upon their neighbors across the Israeli border?

If a clearer demonstration of the random and noxious nature of religious faith is needed, I’m having a hard time providing one just now.

A Test of Faith: Challenging the Child Killers

Terry Firma

Mar

9

2013

I’ve been thinking about the parents who have so much religious faith that they let their sick kid die without ever calling a doctor. God will heal their offspring, they feel certain — and if not, whaddaya gonna do, it’s God’s will to call the child to heaven.

Hittman wrote about this cruel insanity the other day — here.

I have a challenge for these people. If you believe in God’s providence, then

testfaith1

At about 50 miles, give or take. One to two minutes ought to do it.

I do hope you’ll take me up on it — but only on a very lonely stretch of road, or on a huge empty parking lot.

Oh, and leave the kids at home.

Ready, set, rev it, go! 

Covering Christ in Dead Skin Cells

Terry Firma

Mar

8

2013

…and other news from the wondrous world of religion.

• David Hooker, an associate art professor at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal-arts school near Chicago, has been sprinkling layer after layer of fine debris from the school’s vacuum cleaners over a 5-foot ceramic likeness of a crucified Christ. The resulting sculpture symbolizes death and resurrection. Says Hooker, “Literally, this dirt contains skin cells from the community. The idea is that our bodies are now connected to the body of Christ.” Wheaton President Philip Ryken is an admirer. He believes that Hooker’s work stands for the things that are “disappointing and even dirty about us” — but he finds the sculpture reassuring because “God loves us in spite of our sins.” Well, sir, if you say so, we won’t argue. Let us just note that religion in art sure has its vagaries. Taking a photo of a crucifix submerged in urine: decades of Christian hissy fits. Covering Christ in dead skin cells: applause and reverence.

christ_vacuum

• Every 12 years, up to 80 million Hindus travel to Allahabad, India, for the months-long Maha Kumbh Mela festival. According to National Geographic, “some take advantage of the swirling crowds to abandon elderly relatives.” Says one human-rights activist who has helped the forlorn and abandoned, and who wishes to remain anonymous: “Old people have become useless, [relatives] don’t want to look after them, so they leave them and go.” A local social worker added that it happens mostly to elderly widows. She estimates that dozens of old people are deliberately abandoned during the holy gathering. They are often untraveled and illiterate, and consequently don’t know exactly where they’re from, making reunions unlikely.

• A Muslim barber in Lahore, Pakistan, accused a Christian young man of blaspheming the prophet Mohammed. Soon, a bloodthirsty mob assembled, and 150 families had to abandon their homes to save their skins. Police investigated and found the barber had made up the blasphemy allegation. [UPDATE: The mob torched upwards of 100 houses and everything in them. Photos here.]

• A religious school in Israel fired a female teacher for becoming pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, claiming that such a pregnancy is an affront to Torah family values. The judiciary, however, told the school to stuff it. Tel Aviv Labor Court (ha — labor!) ordered school authorities to compensate the young mother for the loss of her job. The judges ruled that “the right to be a parent, the freedom to work, and human dignity and liberty” trumped the religious concerns of the school.

• Another faith-related labor dispute recently occurred in England. A British residential-care worker whose contract stipulated she would occasionally have to work on Sundays refused to do so on religious grounds, and was ultimately fired. She promptly filed against her former employer for religious discrimination. The Employment Appeal Tribunal that heard the case argued that lots of her co-religionists work on Sunday without complaining; and that even so, the employer had made every reasonable accommodation to allow the worker to practice her faith. Consequently, the complaint was dismissed.

• This very website is most likely a purveyor of illegal anti-religious hate — at least according to Indian police. Cops have set their sights on Facebook blasphemers, noting that “While many of these posts are pictures that depict gods and religious figures in a bad light, there are even status updates that mock at the religious texts.”  Mocking religion is a crime in India. A police unit referred to as the “state hi-tech crime inquiry cell” is demanding that Facebook release the identities of the apparently pseudonymous critics.

• Police in Bangladesh arrested eight members of a radical Muslim student organization, after uncovering the group’s plot to assassinate 10 religious leaders. Those targeted are also Muslims, but of a slightly more liberal variety.

On This Day in 1948…

Terry Firma

Mar

8

2013

…the U.S. Supreme Court banned as unconstitutional the use of public school facilities by religious organizations as a venue for religious instruction to students. In an 8-to-1 ruling, the court held that such activities violate the First Amendment. Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion in the case, known as McCollum v. Board of Education.

The Supremes found that

neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force or influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will, or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.

No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the federal government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups, and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’

wall

We shall keep it intact.

[image via Little Victories]