Are churchgoing, 'all-American' people more trustworthy?

Are churchgoing, 'all-American' people more trustworthy than other types of people? People in Wichita seem so shocked about BTK. I would fully expect that a killer who evaded the police for 30 years WOULD be one of these. What could be better cover?


Are churchgoing, 'all-American' people more trustworthy than other types of people?

Highly religious subcultures are almost always more violent. It has become a cliché in many entertainment media -- the redneck totin' a shootin'-iron, overdressed Sicilian Mafiosi, "A-Rabb" terrorists, etc.

Religious subcultures are usually "honor cultures", obsessed with social rank, place and artificially intense rage over broken taboos. They also have a distressing tendency to beat their women and children, and justify it with scriptural quotes.

As for trust, their word is their bond -- unless it's inconvenient.

--p!

I don't know that this was a fundie church or a "highly religious subculture".


Just more your typical neighborhood church-going, scout-leading married with kids guy...

and the question wasn't about highly religious people. There are plenty of believers who are not violent. In fact, look at many "do-good" social organizations and you'll find many religious folks in the ranks of volunteers and employees.

Generalizing like this is only hurtful, and never helpful.

This is a well-known problem among people who take their faith seriously, and hundreds of books have been written about it. Even religions we don't associate with violence, like Buddhism, Judaism, and Mennonite/Amish bretheren, have all had their turns operating the machinery of the abbatoirs. Tibetan Buddhists, for example, used to be bloodthirsty and macabre to a degree that would shock the average reader of Chogyam Trungpa, Robert Thurman, or Tenzing Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama.

Religions with a spiritual community of any value and influence come to terms with and reject violence and "honor culture" as sinful, and are active in their religious communities in stopping it.

In America, we prefer to overlook religious-associated violence and abuse and attribute them to "a few bad apples". But it's the nature of religious belief that people with violent urges will justify them with their faith -- and why the prophets and saints universally have stressed the need for ongoing spiritual growth among all the faithful and a spirit of brotherhood toward people in general.

--p!

those with inherent tendencies toward violence. Has religion been used for violent ends? You betcha. Does that mean religion = violence? Not at all. There have been non-religious violent cultures as well. Does that mean all non-religious people are violent?

The problem is in the people with violent urges, who find religion a useful tool. Your original post says, in essence, that hammers are violent, b/c people have used them to hurt others, while ignoring the fact that hammers have facilitated a great deal of good as well.

Generalizations such as the one you made are always dangerous.

Your quote: "Generalizations such as the one you made are always dangerous." (Emphasis mine.)

Violence and hypocrisy are endemic to religious subcultures. This does not mean "every person" or "every religion". I repeatedly made those points.

The very first sentence of my original post made it clear that I was talking about specific religious subcultures. The later posts further clarified my arguments, including making the point that these problems are not only well-known within their own religions, but that significant (if often ineffective) efforts have been made to correct them.

You've decided to "upgrade" my argument to include all religions and religious people -- in effect, making a very large strawman argument.

--p!

Church going people are LESS trustworthy than the non-believers I know. When they do wrong, they know they will be forgiven by their imaginary friend in the sky. Also, real nut cases like this serial killer sometimes murder becauses "it's God's will."

Because I never suspected that some people would take this as an opportunity to bash ALL churchgoers.

I'm an atheist, and pretty thoroughly dislike religion in general, but I would never disparage all churchgoers. My beloved grandmother never missed church, and I loved her very much. And she was no fundie.

You want to bash far-out fundies, fine, but there's no reason to disparage regular churchgoers (I'm sure that there are a few of them at DU, BTW.)

The untrustworthy people I've met were all believers. Obviously it does not follow that all believers are untrustworthy. I didn't realize I was taking "this as an opportunity to bash ALL churchgoers."

I really do think that churchgoers do tend to be less trustworthy.

The odds are that most people you meet of ANY sort will be believers - churchgoers is another story.

And it's not that your comments were all that horrible - I was just hoping that a little preemptive chastising on my part might help prevent an eventual piling-on of posts bashing churchgoers.


I don't like the notion that this is shocking. It's not. A lot of bad people are churchgoers. I know of one who is a giggling mass murderer... But I think it would be unfair to say that all, or even most of them are bad.

Read my second post -- "sin" working under color of faith is a major problem within all religious communities.

I don't say this to tar the faithful with a broad brush, but to criticize a huge, and often overlooked, problem within faith-based organizations -- a problem that has historically involved mass criminality, and overlooked it.

--p!

Sadly, religion is very often used as a cover for many crimes, lies, and hate.
BTW, I love your "toaster" avatar. :)

I've become a NUGE BSGTNS fan!

Too many hypocrites with screwed up priorities and a total disregard for the social economic exhortations in the Gospel.

Here's a prime example:

http://awideawake.blogspot.com/2005/02/project.html

To quote:
"I'm starting a new project on this blog (this makes the amount of started projects five, and the number of finished ones zero). I have today registered on the Democratic Underground and will begin scanning the news then posting about it on DU, attributing things to Bush/Rove conspiracy theories that I will have made up (this includes fabricating plots and "evidence"- most likely photoshopic). I'm going to see how many of the folks believe each one of these, then post the results on this blog.

Hopefully, I can even use it in my book."

:hi:

And be sure to post at FreeRepublic. They will believe anything. Even that there were weapons of mass destruction.

Just preface everything with "Ted Kennedy said this" or "Barbara Boxer said that" and follow with some heinous thing the fascist bushites are responsible for. Whatever "terrible" things are done, just be sure to attribute it to liberals, then the freepers will believe ANYTHING.

:eyes:

I strongly object to deliberately posting hoax stories at DU. Why the hell would you welcome someone who is openly announcing his intention to disrupt?

Sorry if you thought I was serious, and I mean that. I'll do my best to be careful with what I consider (apparently mistakenly) my sense of humor.

If that's what you're saying, then please leave and don't come back. That's disgusting.

Sorry if I didn't make it clear, I'm linking *to* the jackass that is doing this, it's not me.

Just thought i'd point it out.



Rob
http://robfindlay.org/mt/

Welcome to DU, then!


:hi:

I thought i should alert you guys that this dumbass is going to be running intereference your way.



Rob

I'm sure they'll appreciate the information.

..sometimes it seems that some truly bad or tormented people turn to religion to 'fight their demons', and their true nature comes out.

df

He's an anomaly. He falls outside the statisical norms. Serial killers of this type are far and few between. The BTK killer may have been a churchgoer, but he was also a Scout leader, animal control officer, and father. His membership in those categories says precisely nothing about those roles or institutions.

The hypocrisy is so thick dynamite won't cut it.

...anecdotal "evidence" in the ensuing discussion. Pretty tendentious all around. Have fun!

There could have only been one other possible choice - that churchgoers are MORE likely to be involved in bad things. I left that out because it would lead to unfair bashing of churchgoers.

There IS a false sense among some people that their chuchgoing neighbors/friends are somehow more trustworthy than the "others" they only see on TV or through the car window. I only want to bust up that phony stereotype. Churchgoers have sh*t that stinks just like the rest of us.

but it seems to me that most of the people I see in church are old people. So I have always felt they could be trusted. The fundies that I met in college seemed to be decent people as well. Clearly, though, predators, thieves, and manipulators can hide anywhere, so I am not sure what finding one psycho among all the church-goers in the Wichita area really proves. Are most of the other violent offenders in the state prison former church-goers as well?

And most of them have probably attended church in their lives. That would be consistent with the demographics of this country.

I honestly don't think church attendance tells you anything about whether a person is trustworthy, or even a believer. You could be a total atheist at heart, but attend church weekly because it's "the thing to do" - or because you like the company.

It just proves that you don't know somebody, unless you actually know them.

seems like not necessarily even then :shrug:

Most people in this country are church members. My hometown (Presbyterian) church had something like 1000 members, but less than 300 on an average Sunday. One preacher co-worker I knew, called some people CME Christians (Christmas, Mother's Day, Easter). Catholics make weekly attendance a requirement, and many fundies I have known go at least 3 times a week.
I think church attendance is not nearly as high as membership or claiming the religion. Unscientific, but when I polled my classes almost all of them claimed to be Christian, but a small minority had been to church on the Sunday past. That may be a function of their age. People go back to church when they have children that they want to goto Sunday school.

...150 regular attendees and 150 pledging members. In other words, only about 30% of stated members are actually participating in any meaningful way beyond holiday attendance.

Of the 150 "real" members, I can state with certainty that 0% live up to the Christian ideal at all times. :-)

who voted the other way?

If going to church makes you a Christian, does going to the garage make you a car?

But as always, human nature is...human nature. :shrug:

the more up front they are about their religion, the more likely they are to try to cheat or steal from you.

When I was younger, I just assumed that most church-goers were better (more righteous and moral) than the rest of us.

Later, I realized that they are the same as everyone else.

And finally, I see now that no, many (not all) of them are worse than the rest of us. The echo chamber they exist in seems to breed a smug self-righteousness, even as they advocate explicitly un-Christian, un-American policies.

Or am I still wrong?

In the 19th and early 20th c the churches served the role of educating, preserving ways of culture, etc for immigrants from all over Europe. The Cabrini brothers began their own ministry in the Chicago area, concerned about how many were coming over with NO access to church, who might become exploited in America's capitalist machine.

In my husband's own mostly German background family, settling in Iowa from the 1850s, one can clearly see the difference "being churched" meant (as one side was rich and not, the other poorer, yet attached to church.) It was enough to raise the class and culture of the dirt poor family members, and made the grandchildren, all raised in Lutheran elementary school, into committed, progressive, educated and good citizen boys!

I realize that Bush's sullying of the churches is causing all this prejudice, but it really is pretty ignorant.

My own suspicion about Rader is that he is the right age, and close to the right geographic area (think Franklin scandal et al)--I wonder what his father did--if it were military at all, or if he were raised in any kind of orphanage, there is a good chance all his anger was created in the MK-ULTRA black op. Otherwise, WHY would he suddenly want to send letters to the police after some 25 years? There seems to be a need to tell, beyond his own guilty deeds.

Anyone who does such horrid crimes has anger springing from some torture he has experienced. And yet his choice of victims is baffling. It is not surprising either that one tries to purge the hurt, the evil feelings, through doing good works, like the Boy Scouts, like church.

No proof. Just some questions that make one go "Hmmmmmm."

but the history of the church -- ''religion'' is replete with nightmares -- torture, murder, mayhem of all sorts.
right up the present day.

too many weak minded people have been used by hypocrites and charlatans for all sorts of religions.

any reasoning person would know that the ''religous'' minded are as likely to commit crimes, ethical breaches, and any other sort of wrong doing as any one else.