I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
.
That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Reader Mail: Orders of Magnitude citation
November 10, 2008
Agnostic writes in with a question about author Vox Day:
I’m curious what the evidence is for Vox’s statement that atheists are orders of magnitude more likely to commit murder. I know it his/her statement, but you obviously endorse it.
I’d be surprised that there is evidence of a difference at all, but certainly not a 100 fold difference.
btw - I agree with your take on the Darwin Fish - it seems an openly hostile gesture.
Vox is nothing if not open: his book, The Irrational Atheist
can be downloaded for free (although I’m only going to link to the purchaseable version at Amazon.com — finding the freebie is left as an exercise to the good Reader). And it is within the pages of said book that his evidence for the statement can be found.
I can summarize it in brief, but cannot hope to do it justice without spending much more time on this post than I have to spend. Essentially, he approaches the question from a variety of directions, and by looking at different bits of data. For example, he picks apart Sam Harris “red state” argument (which incorrectly concluded that Christians committed more crimes than did non-religious folk) by breaking the analysis down past the state level and looking at things county by county.
And he notes that crime is consistently highest in “blue” counties (e.g. Democrat-supporting counties). This observation is then correlated against various bits of demographic information — including the fact that atheists and agnostics tend to be much more likely to vote “blue” than “red.”
Of course, correlation does not imply causation; more investigation is needed. Indeed, the above was basically just a glorious take-down of Harris’ errors.
To support his actual point, Vox draws on evidence from both the United States and Britain which demonstrates that while there are certainly more Christians in prison than non-Christians in both countries (which one would expect: there tend to be more Christians than non-Christians in both countries), Christianity in the prisons is actually under-represented when compared to its prevalence in the general population. Irreligion of all stripes is, on the other hand, over-represented in the prison population when compared against its prevalence in the general population, to the tune of over 300%.
As noted, it is best to just consult Vox’s book, if one wants the hard figures, and more and better exegesis with the data. But hopefully that outlines, if only broadly, where the statement originates from.
