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A pinch and a snip out of an article in AAnews
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[209.240.198.215]) by mailsorter-103-2.iap.bryant.webtv.net (8.8.8/ms.gso.01Apr98) with ESMTP id PAA01327; Mon, 7 Jun 1999 15:49:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from production@localhost) by postoffice-153.iap.bryant.webtv.net (8.8.8/po.gso.24Feb98) id PAA00592; Mon, 7 Jun 1999 15:49:54 -0700 (PDT) X-WebTV-Signature: 1 ETAtAhQ5uQxIpgQMkWcg6Nt4dy+cUt3k7wIVALoHdh5I4f1Geiz6xsoNE3uFk+DcFrom: headbands@webtv.net (James Veverka) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 18:49:54 -0400 (EDT) To: headbands@webtv.net
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Actual atheist percentage in the United States for the year 1996 are around 22%. (George Gallup Jr., in fact, got caught fiddling the numbers to try to make the decline appear to have stopped. CODESH and various other secular publications covered the Gallup attempt to deceive the people.)
Dear Mr. Swift:
The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious
affiliations of inmates. The following are total number of inmates per
religion category:
Adventist 621 American Indian 2408 Atheist 156 Bahai 9 Buddhist 882 Catholic 29267 Church of Christ 1303 Hindu 119 Jehovah Witness 665 Jewish 1325 Krishna 7 Moorish 1066 Mormon 298 Muslim 5435 Nation 1734 No Preference 13878 Orthodox 375 Pentecostal 1093 Protestant 26162 Rasta 1485 Santeria 117 Scientology 190 Sikh 14 Unknown 4503 -------------------------------- Total 96,968
STUDIES: ATHEISTS SUPPLY LESS THAN 1% OF PRISON POPULATIONS
by Wayne Aiken, North Carolina Director
AMERICAN ATHEISTS
It's surprising how many people remark to me, "You're an Atheist? You
must have no conscience about committing crime then." Nothing could be
further from the truth. In fact, if we examine the population of our
prisons, we see a very different picture.
In "The New Criminology," Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that
two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts
without religious training is about 1/10th of 1%. W.T. Root, Professor
of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners
and said, "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens
character," adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and
Free-Thinkers were absent from penitentiaries, or nearly so.
During 10 years in Sing-Sing, of those executed for murder 65% were
Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1%
non-religious.
Steiner and Swancara surveyed Canadian prisons and found 1,294
Catholics, 435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and 1 Unitarian.
Dr. Christian, Superintendent of the N.Y. State Reformatories,checked
records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only 4 college graduates. In
"Who's Who," 91% were college graduates; Christian commented that
"intelligence and knowledge produce right living," and, "crime is the
offspring of superstition and ignorance."
Surveyed Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.
In Joliet Prison, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617
Methodists and no prisoners identified as non-religious.
Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in the state population;
but in the prisons, there were 22 times as many Baptists as Jews, and 18
times as many Methodists as Jews. In Sing-Sing, there were 1,553
inmates, 855 of them (over half) Catholics, 518 Protestants, 117 Jews,
and 8 non-religious.
Steiner first surveyed 27 states and found 19,400 Christians, 5,000 with
no preference and only 3 Agnostics (one each in Connecticut, New
Hampshire, and Illinois). A later, more exhaustive survey found 60,605
Christians, 5,000 Jews, 131 Pagans, 4,000 "no preference," and only 3
Agnostics.
In one 19-state survey, Steiner found 15 non-believers, Spiritualists,
Theosophists, Deists, Pantheists and 1 Agnostic among nearly 83,000
inmates. He labeled all 15 as "anti-christians." The Elmira, N.Y.
reformatory system overshadowed all others, with nearly 31,000 inmates,
including 15,694 Catholics (half) and 10,968 Protestants, 4,000 Jews,
325 refusing to answer, and 0 unbelievers.
In the East, over 64% of inmates are Roman Catholic. Throughout the
national prison population, they average 50%. A national census of the
general population found Catholics to be about 15% (and they count from
the diaper up). Hardly 12% are old enough to commit a crime, and half of
these are women. That leaves an adult Catholic population of 6%
supplying 50% of the prison population.
>From AANEWS
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