Atheists Are "Bad"? All Evidence to the Contrary

The pathetic freakazoid attack that all atheists must be bad people just because we don't live our lives according to the dictates of Bronze Age mythology is easily debunked with empirical evidence. Just look at prison populations, which are overwhelmingly religious.

 

Now, via Divine Irony, a paper on atheism, secularism and social outcomes reviews the scientific evidence. It concludes:

This essay began with a well-known Biblical quote stating that atheists are simply no
good. Do the findings of contemporary social science support this Biblical assertion? The
clear answer is no. Atheism and secularity have many positive correlates, such as higher
levels of education and verbal ability, lower levels of prejudice, ethnocentrism, racism,
and homophobia, greater support for women’s equality, child-rearing that promotes independent thinking and an absence of corporal punishment, etc. And at the societal level,
with the important exception of suicide, states and nations with a higher proportion of
secular people fare markedly better than those with a higher proportion of religious
people.

 Read the whole thing.