moralityI was curious as to whether someone is more or less moral, or about the same, depending on their beliefs. I believe religion has an impact on making people less moral. My reason for this belief is simply because you can write off your bad deeds by apologising to a god, whereas atheists do not have such an apology to make and therefore are more accountable for themselves.
This is backed up by the prison survey, however, of course, inmates may lie (due to fear against being non-Christian for example). I was wondering what other people’s beliefs were.
I believe religion has an impact on making people less moral. My reason for this belief is simply because you can write off your bad deeds by apologising to a god …
That is not “religion” - that is some sects of the Christian religion (and perhaps others). I’d venture to guess that this is not part of most religions.
This is backed up by the prison survey, however, of course, inmates may lie
That survey is useless to the discussion, and the page is offensive to any reasoning being. Aside from not telling the truth, inmates are often converted in prison. In other words, they could have been atheists when they committed the crime and then converted to “get clean” as so often happens. Finally, law enforcement is necessarily not a good source of data on morality; for example, blacks arrested during civil rights protests were often arrested for their perfectly moral acts; further, possessing drugs is generally not considered immoral and yet drug possession is a major contributor to prison populations (especially in the U.S.).
Now that I’m done correcting you, I’ll try to answer the question :)
The answer: Undefined.
There is no objective measure of morality, so you cannot claim to be more or less moral than someone else nor can you claim that one group is morally superior to another, except by your own subjective opinion.
Perhaps a better question would be something like “As a percentage of the population who commits more thefts, atheists or Christians?” - There may be actual data on that somewhere, albeit if you were fooled by the prison population data you might consider asking for help before interpreting the results. Then perhaps when you form your opinion on which groups are morally superior to other groups, you can at least have an informed opinion.
If you look at the public school system since religion has been removed, you have clear evidence that morality (and the quality of the education itself I might add) tends to go in the toilet as faith is abandoned.
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