Are there other possible explanations? For example, Ukraine is considerably less religious than the U.S. (46% vs. 69%),* but its homicide rate is higher (6.34 vs. 5.35 per 100,000) and almost twice as high as Thailand's (3.24). Venezuela's murder rate is a horrific 56.33/100,000 but its percentage of believers is 79%, while much more religious India (90%) has a homicide rate of 3.22 - even less than that of the United States, and only slightly more than Estonia's (3.19/100,000), which is listed as the least religious country (16%). So if a huge country like India with 90% religious believers has a murder rate about the same as a country with 16% believers, does your correlation hold? Or is your paintbrush a bit on the wide side?

*Sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country

correlated with geographical location. There is a map at the Telegraph for religiosity - I couldn't paste it.

The 20 most religious countries according to The Telegraph based on the Win Gallup polls from 2008, 2009, and 2015. The list appeared in the telegraph in January 2018 and says the numbers are the most recent available for each country. They also map the countries - there is also a geographical correlation with religiosity.

But what are the correlations among religiosity, homicide, poverty and poor governance? The OP seems to imply that some countries are more homicidal because they are more religious, and I'm just suggesting that it's much more complicated than that. Maybe people in some of these countries turn to religion because it's their only source of relief from poverty, crime and bad government.

It would take serious effort to find any reasonable association.

some of the "most religious listed" like Bosnia are fairly close to some pretty stable countries that are least religious like the UK (1.6 to 1.2).

China is certainly not a regime anyone would say is one we should duplicate, but yes they have low crime because they are effectively a dictatorship with highly conformist society backed by a strong government.

Violence is human. It was here before religion, it will be here, unfortunately, after religion, unless we literally evolve into something "better" than our current state of being.

So it may be that religion and poverty are causally related.

An hypothesis : maybe religion, magical thinking, causes, reinforces, poverty.

It's just that some people don't want anyone else to look at it. Apparently to them, religion deserves special protection above all other ideas and institutions.

and the same level of proof before saying it's directly correlated to violence (or any other positive or negative trait).

I'm pretty sure if someone came along and said, religion is correlated with love and peace, you'd want a lot more vigorous level of proof than what was provided in the OP, yes?

some folks just don't want to have an actual discussion, they just want to bomb-throw.

Got any basic stats like what was posted to show a correlation between religiosity and love/peace?

Perhaps capitalism causes poverty.

Perhaps rich people need poverty to keep the workers in line.

and their tactic of division.

Stating the obvious.

If you want to make inferences from those facts, go right ahead.

Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Czech Republic. The average height of a male citizen of these five countries is 5'11". The average height of a male citizen of the most religious countries (98%+) for which those statistics are available is about 5'5". Does religion make you short, or does being short make you religious?

What a revolutionary concept!

The major correlation is probably between religion and poverty, although it's hard to say which would be more causative of the other - does religion (or living in a highly religious society) tend to make people/societies poorer, or does poverty tend to lead people/societies to embrace religion?

Then, the correlation between poverty and average height is obvious. Malnutrition stunts growth.

Is there a causal connection between religion and sustained poverty? Marx seemed to think so and he might have been right or wrong, but ignoring such questions because religion is always assumed to be something good for society probably isn't such a great idea.

or poverty causes religion. I'm just trying to make the point that it's a complicated analysis, not arguing that religion is necessarily good for society.

The OP refers to the correlation of religion and violence. Poverty and average height may or may not be contributing factors, but introducing them for no good reason doesn't further discussion much.

Here's a more relevant question. China is frequently provided as an example of the intolerance of atheism, as if either or those things is a causal factor of the other. Another way to look at it is China is a country with more than 4 times the population of the US with roughly the same land mass, yet is far less violent than the US. So let's say China suddenly became more tolerant of religion and as a result became more religious. Would violence be positively or negatively affected? So maybe there's arguments for either, or another that says there would be no effect.

Now consider Thailand. Culturally it's very similar to China. Poverty is greater than China, but not by much. On the scale of totalitarianism they aren't that far apart although Thailand is clearly more so. Religion and violence are pretty much diametrically opposed. So is there a causal factor between the two? Perhaps not, but ignoring the possibility doesn't make much sense, and whether you do or not there's still no shortage of people who argue religion must be assumed to be a positive influence on society with pretty much no evidence to support that assumption and at least some correlative evidence which suggests otherwise.

which is also 95% religious and the men are only 5'7". Another very rich country is Norway, where the people are not very religious (21%) and the men are 5'11.5". Norway was a rather poor country (and more religious) until the 20th century but Norwegians have always been tall anyhow. So there are obviously a lot of factors contributing to all of these circumstances, which was kind of my point in the first place.

So some factors just aren't that hard to figure out. Others require more consideration.

the Norwegians seem to have shrugged off their gloomy Lutheran Pietist theology. The difference might have to do with the nature of the societies and religions involved in each. Qatar is Muslim, and middle-eastern Muslims do not seem to want to stray from their faith, rich or not. It is also an absolute monarchy, with little press freedom, and manual labor is done mostly by foreign workers who are not at all rich. Norway is a constitutional monarchy with a king who has no power at all; the society is egalitarian with a strong social safety net and better press freedom than the U.S.; the people are well-educated and poverty is rare. Why is one rich country religious and the other not? In the case of Qatar it might be because its monarchy requires it. In Norway, although the Lutheran church is the "established" church, neither attendance nor belief is required.

It's pretty hard to make causal inferences on those two things when they typically follow very different cycles.

Pointing to an exception as if it disproves the rule is rather like the climate change denialists claiming that a record low temperature proves warming isn't happening.

You do understand what that means?

But one also has to take statistical outliers into consideration.

And if you try to convert, the gov't persecutes you and kills you.

Don't believe me? Go to any Islamic middle-east country and setup a church, then keep in touch.

and instead allowed its citizens to freely practice any religion or none, it would become a hot, sandy version of Norway?

so is Qatar. So is Bahrain. I'm going to guess Slovenia is too.

All with lower scores than China.

Palestine, UAE, and several other countries that are fairly religious (e.g. Bulgaria is 82% Orthodox Christian) score lower than UK.

Meanwhile Russia is over 40% when you combine spiritual not religious, atheist, and undeclared and they are at the bottom on intentional murders.

It did the exact same thing I did.

of theists and minorities.


So what are we to make of that fact?

of theists and minorities. China isn't particularly noteworthy in that respect. For example, here's a map showing where Christians, in particular, have been experiencing persecution.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/january/top-50-countries-christian-persecution-world-watch-list.html

Or, are we to assume that every human society shows intolerance?