Hey Russell2

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I think we can show a link between religiosity and immorality. Now whether that link is causal or the two correlate due to other factors I think is open to debate but there is a statistically significant inverse correlation between religiosity and morality I would suggest.


The problem is to weed out the other factors, like education and economic level. One possible way to do that is to compare states on several statistics at once: divorce, child and spouse physical abuse, sexual abuse, education, religion, hate crimes, abortion rates vs age, teenage pregnancy, unwed pregnancy, health, etc and weed out some by showing different relationship rates in different states.

When I was fresh out of university the second time I was involved in a study of noise pollution, and one of the things we did was correlate noise pollution levels against violent crime levels, city by city. We found a straight line correlation between noise level and violent crime level, but the correlation slope was different between canada and the us.

When you have a result like that you can only conclude that both could be related to another factor not measured. We also found that a survey done of mensa people compared to general people showed no correlation in greater awareness of noise levels. Interesting time. The results are published and buried in some archive somewhere, many pages hand typed as it was several days before laptop computers.

Enjoy