Topics
that we are advised to avoid at dinner parties are politics and religion. When
I was young and sometimes paid attention to what I was told, these two topics
were basically separate. Now, however, they are all too often as entangled as a
bowl of spaghetti.
The
irony is that religion is oft times claimed to be the basis for our moral
compass, while politics, well it’s just politics. The moral compass thought is
an important one and important thoughts are meat and drink to our friends with
a psychological bent who love to measure and in this case, measure how well we
stand up to the claim.
Previous
studies have been lab based. And the results have been both interesting and
surprising. For example, groups who were given tasks to write about a god with
either a focus on supernatural punishment or caring, benevolence and forgiving
support showed quite different behaviors when it came to paying themselves for
the work done. Any guesses? The supernatural punishment brigade was very
honest, but the forgiving, benevolent brigade was quite dishonest with their
overpayments. So the extant data indicated that fire and brimstone was a good
thing.
Of
course these were just lab experiments and Shariff and Rhemtulla decided to
take on the world as their stage and set about meta-data mining on a global
scale, reporting out on PLoS ONE (1). They rifled through the drawers of 67
countries for the religiosity level of >14k people and with the magic of the
statistical officiando managed a rating per country.
The
crime figures were gleaned from the United Nations for the same 67 countries
and were analyzed in detail for crimes such as homicide, human trafficking down
to stealing a car.
The
results cover countries with all the major religions and the big elephant
trampling around in our garden of complacency is, quote “The degree to which a country’s rate of belief in heaven
outstrips its rate of belief in hell significantly predicts higher national
crime rates.”
The threat of fire and brimstone is apparently important to keep
us honest and not overpaying ourselves. But it is not a great virtue if you
watch your fellow citizens starve. Nor does it address the problem of the 1%-ers who overpay themselves to a frightening level and believe that the crumbs from
their table are sufficient to “trickle down” to keep the rest of us well
behaved and working hard.
