Just yesterday, I learned that another former aquaintance of mine has been convicted of sex offences. My mother called me and told me about the conviction of Jonathan Hartman in Indiana two years ago.
Jonathan's parents, Richard and Susan Hartman, were friends with my parents. They met when my parents were stationed in Brandon, Mb. The Hartmans were in Bismarck, ND at the time. We used to go down to North Dakota and visit and they used to periodically come to Canada to visit us. The last time I saw them was in 1991, if I remember correctly. They came to visit us after we'd moved to Vancouver. Jonathan would have been 11 then.
My mom said that she had been thinking about the Hartmans and was thinking about making contact with them after 20 years and catching up. She, of course, turned to the internet to track them down and was horrified at what she found.
She found that in 2009 they were stationed in Greensboro, Indiana. Jonathan, now 29 years old, served as a volunteer youth pastor in the church. In April of that year, Jonathan was arrested for having sex with three 13 year old girls that he had met through the church's music program. Evidently the sex occurred sometimes at Jonathan's home, but mostly inside the church building. One of the girls became pregnant by him, and had his baby.
In jail for child molestation, apparently unsatisfied with the amount of trouble he was already in, Jonathan attempted to offer another prisoner the sum of $50,000 in exchange for murdering 13 people including the three girls and his own illegitemately conceived baby.
In 2010 he was convicted of the molestation charges and the added charge of conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
Of course, my mother's feeling was for her friends and how horrible it must have been for Richard and Susan to go through all of this mess that their son created. She said to me "I'm so glad that you guys (referring to my brother, Craig, and me) never got into trouble like that. I could hear the strain in her voice as she struggled to not cry.
It got me to thinking about this idea that teaching Christianity to children makes for more moral people. The fact is that the opposite appears to be true. In 2005, a study was done by the Kripke Centre called Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies. The study sought to determine the impact of religioscity on criminal behaviour. The results were probably not what they were looking for. They found that there is an inverse correlation between how religious a country is and how healthy the society is. The more religious a country is, the worse the country does in terms crime levels and many other societal indicators.
Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Prisons released the following numbers that show what percentage in incarcetared inmates belonged to which religion:
Response Number % ---------------------------- -------- Catholic 29267 39.164% Protestant 26162 35.008% Muslim 5435 7.273% American Indian 2408 3.222% Nation 1734 2.320% Rasta 1485 1.987% Jewish 1325 1.773% Church of Christ 1303 1.744% Pentecostal 1093 1.463% Moorish 1066 1.426% Buddhist 882 1.180% Jehovah Witness 665 0.890% Adventist 621 0.831% Orthodox 375 0.502% Mormon 298 0.399% Scientology 190 0.254% Atheist 156 0.209% Hindu 119 0.159% Santeria 117 0.157% Sikh 14 0.019% Bahai 9 0.012% Krishna 7 0.009%
Obviously, one could argue that there are more religious people than there are atheists. However, Atheists in most polls make up 15% or so of the population and account for 0.209% of inmates? Fifteen percent of the population and only one fifth of one percent of the prison population. Christians make up 85 percent of the population and about 80% of the prison population.
This is why nobody should believe the lie that without God, morality falls apart. It actually appears that the opposite is true. The best thing that could happen to society is to see God thrown out.
No comments:
Post a Comment