SEATTLE (CBS Seattle) JUNE 22,
2012, 8:31 AM
Believing if you are on a “highway to
hell” could impact whether or not if you commit a crime.
A study
published in the scientific journal PLoS One by University of Oregon’s Azim Shariff and University of Kansas’s
Mijke Rhemtulla finds that people who believe in hell are less likely to commit a
crime while people who believe in heaven more likely are to get in trouble with
the law.
The two
professors collected
data for belief in hell, heaven and God from the World and
European Values Surveys that were conducted between 1981 until 2007 with 143,197
participants based in 67 countries. They compared the
data to the mean standardized crime rate in those countries based on homicides, robberies, rapes,
kidnappings, assaults, thefts, auto thefts, drug crimes, burglaries and human
trafficking.
“[R]ates of belief in heaven and hell had significant, unique, and opposing effects on crime
rates,” Shariff and Rhemtulla found in the study. “Belief in hell predicted
lower crime rates … whereas belief in heaven predicted higher crime rates.”
They also
found that a recent social psychological experiment found that Christian participants who believe in a forgiving God gave themselves more
money for the study.
“Participants
in the punishing God and both human conditions overpaid themselves less than 50
cents more than what they deserved for their anagrams, and did not
statistically differ from the neutral condition, those who
wrote about a forgiving God overpaid themselves significantly more-nearly
two dollars,” the study found.
Shariff and
Rhemtulla believe that the study
raises “important questions about the potential impact of religious beliefs on
global crime.”
NOTE: Normally, when I see studies like this one, I ask myself “who paid for this and how can I get them to give me grant money?,” but I looked up Prof. Shariff and Rhemtulla’s paper on Prof. Shariff’s U. of Oregon website and in PLoS (Public Library of Science)(Link) and it appears to be self-funded. For anyone interested, it's quite short and can be found HERE on Prof., Shariff's Culture and Morality Lab homepage (right-hand side of the page under Most Downloaded Papers).
My own hell belief conforms pretty exactly to the Limbourg brothers’ vision from Les Tres Riches Heures (1416) seen in center position above. My heaven conception was visually fixed when I first saw Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) as a child (top illustration). The Who’s best set-opener, John Entwistle’s great Heaven and Hell (Link), completed the thought.
I find William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s 1878 A Soul Brought To Heaven (shown above this Note) simply overdramatic and upsetting.
Readers continuing down this road might want to to consult other sections of the June 22 edition of PLoS, including especially the revived Small Wonders section covering “marsupial genitalia, sharks with laser beams, and doggie MRIs. * Carl Zimmer wrote a lovely essay on hands. * Rad photo collages made from National Geographic and …”Seriously, PLoS looks like a terrific organization.
John
Alec Entwistle (9 October 1944 – 27 June 2002)
See Also: Sermon: Comparisons Are Invidious (May 6, 2012)(Link)
