Scientific “Proof”: Non Religious people are evil

Allegory with a portrait of a Venetian senator is a 1580s painting by Jacopo Tintoretto. It depicts the morality of earthly things.

Sociologist Philip Truscott of Southwest Baptist University has published a “scientific” paper titled “Rape, Suicide, and the Rise of Religious Nones“. Within it he argues that being non-religious makes you far more probably a rapist and also prone to suicide.

Spoiler: Don’t panic, his paper is pure BS, and the “journal” he has published it in, “the journal of sociology and christianity“. It is not an unbiased source.

OK, let’s dive right into it.

The Abstract

It reads (yes sorry, it is long)…

One of the most widely quoted concepts in late twentieth century criminology was the general theory of crime which proposed that insufficiency of self-control is the most important predictor of criminal behavior. The presence or absence of social bonds promoting self-control is an important element of this theory. This article argues that the decline of one important societal bond, religious affiliation, is impacting the incidence of rape. Since the 2010s, there has been a positive correlation between the proportion of the population declaring no religious affiliation (the “None” rate) in the 50 USA states and the campus rape rate. This correlation was significant in the four years from 2016 (r=0.464, p. 0.001) to 2019 (r=0.393, p. 0.005). Beginning in 2018…