Time Frames and Taboo Data Blog

Is religious posturing really necessary for a person to learn true morality? Rationality prompts one to ask, if moral conduct is attempted by a person because they fear retaliation from some unseen deity, can that really be called “morality”? In truth that amounts to nothing more than pretense encouraged only from self-interest. A few statistics show some facts that are at variance with the religionists’ claims of moral superiority and reveal the genuine integrity of nonbelievers.

In 2005 the United Nations Human Development Report revealed some startling findings that clearly discredit the ideas that without religion all society would be in moral chaos. The U. N. report covered various national standards in regard to such things as life expectancy, per capita income, adult literacy, gender equality, educational attainment, health, homicide rate, and infant mortality.

Ranking highest in all these quality of life and practices of human conduct were the least religious societies such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, the lowest fifty nations in the report in terms of human develoment and social conduct were all doggedly religious. This, of course, does not prove that societal dysfunction is the direct result of religious escapism practices. On the other hand, the report clearly shows that an atheistic approach to life is fully compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil and compassionate society.

Even so, in the United States nonbelievers have long been routinely maligned as being immoral, sinful, untrustworty, devious, etc. Using these typical claims of the religionists we should logically expect that atheists, humanists, free-thought persons and nonbelievers would be the ones that society would most often find necessary to incarcerate in our nations’ many overcrowded prisons and penetentiaries. Curiously, such is not the case. Studies have shown repeatedly that nonbelivers are far less likely to indulge in crimes than are the devout.

Could it possibly be that the minimal criminal indulgences of non-believers is because they take responsibility for their own acts and do not expect some divine overseer to clean it up for them?

This entry was posted on May 1, 2009 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Atheist, Christianity, culture, enlightenment, freethought, history, humanism, life, logic, nontheism, random, religion, Uncategorized with tags civil conduct, crimes, morality, prisons, U.N. report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.