The empirical evidence using micro datasets that I have read about does dispute much of the theory about religion and morality. Prison populations are much more religious than average. The Southeast has higher crime rates, etc. There’s even the aphorism that “there are no atheists in the foxholes.” The people who we, as a society, pay to kill people have higher religious service participation rates. On the other hand, charitable giving is perhaps higher among believers. My point there was that overall is that one of the most common usages of the aphorism, in all of my wide reading on the subject, is a highly debatable theory about general trends in human behavior—not a mechanistic theory about human behavior, as the above post implies.
Calcedonian:
The empirical evidence using micro datasets that I have read about does dispute much of the theory about religion and morality. Prison populations are much more religious than average. The Southeast has higher crime rates, etc. There’s even the aphorism that “there are no atheists in the foxholes.” The people who we, as a society, pay to kill people have higher religious service participation rates. On the other hand, charitable giving is perhaps higher among believers. My point there was that overall is that one of the most common usages of the aphorism, in all of my wide reading on the subject, is a highly debatable theory about general trends in human behavior—not a mechanistic theory about human behavior, as the above post implies.
hrh