Re: Pim and Russell - Food for Thought

Russell Stewart (diamond@rt66.com)
Thu, 19 Jun 1997 22:57:35 -0600

At 07:57 PM 6/18/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Just read this today; it seems to lend empirical support to the idea of the
>transformative value of the Christian worldview:
>
>"[I]nmates who received as little as 10 hours of Bible studies
>a year via Prison Fellowhip were rearrested one year after
>release at a rate of 14 percent, while otherwise comparable
>(i.e., same offense history, same age) inmates who did not
>receive the [Prison Fellowship] intervention recidivated [committed
>another crime] at three times that rate." [This is cited by
>John J. DiIluio, Jr, in his article "The Coming of the Super-Preachers,"
>published in the June 23, 1997 edition of 'The Weekly Standard'.]

Interesting, but there are a couple of question marks. First of
all, has anyone seriously tried giving equal time to a system
of education of humanist moral values? Secondly, this only proves
that people who are already amoral and, well, screwed up are
helped by Christianity. But it doesn't say anything about what
happens if you raise your children from the beginning with a
humanist moral view.

As I have said before, there may well be people who are so
sociopathic that they *need* an externally-enforced morality of
this sort. And we would expect to find more such people in prison
than out of it!

So this really doesn't prove much, except that Christian morality
may have a few niche markets where it is particularly helpful.

_____________________________________________________________
| Russell Stewart |
| http://www.rt66.com/diamond/ |
|_____________________________________________________________|
| Albuquerque, New Mexico | diamond@rt66.com |
|_____________________________|_______________________________|

2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2.