Dyer on the Corelation Between Religion and Crime

From the always-readable Gwynne Dyer:

Religion does not make people behave better. It makes them behave worse.

We’re not talking about suicide bombers and other religious extremists here. We’re talking about ordinary people committing ordinary acts of violence, everyday thefts, and run-of-the-mill sex crimes. The more religious a particular society or region is, the more of that sort of stuff happens.

When this hit the blog-o-sphere a few weeks ago, some of my fellow Atheists really liked to show off this statistic, but they missed the real problem. Dyer doesn't:

There’s a chicken-and-egg question here, because what Paul’s research actually shows is that people are more religious in societies where socio-economic conditions are poor. There is more crime and anti-social behaviour in such societies, but are people behaving badly because they are religious, or just because they are poor, ill-educated and desperate?

The real statistical correlation is between religiosity, poverty and ignorance. Hundreds of millions of religious people are neither poor nor ignorant, but the bottom of the pecking order is where religion has its strongest grip in any society. Raise that bottom level, as countries with good social welfare systems do, and religious belief will gradually decline.

(Emphasis mine) You can get the whole article here.

This fits into my theory that if you want to fix the world's problems, your best bang-for-your-buck is to make sure that every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth gets a decent education. I doubt it will eliminate religion (I think our brains are hard-wired for a bunch of things that combine into a religious urge), but you'll certainly get more moderate believers; ones who are more likely to be tolerant of others' (non) beliefs. I suspect it will have a positive influence on civil rights, over-population and a slew of other hard-core base problems.