During church this Sunday, I began to notice something unusual. Why couldn't I hear my children, I asked? Where were the complaints of "he touched me" or "he called me short?" Wondering, I looked down and focused on something amazing: My nine year old son was hugging his younger sister! This sure to be temporary truce held all the way home as well, causing me to ponder the effect that Church can have on children and, for that matter, on adults.

To me the argument isn't whether religious people can be bad or secular people good, for only the most extreme would argue against such an obvious conclusion; the issue is whether people are made better by Church. Is a normal person who begins to attend Church more likely to give charity, love their neighbor, or risk harm to help others? Would the people who killed Matthew Sheppard been less likely to commit the murder had they attended Church regularly? Would Aldrich Ames have been less likely to sell spy secrets had he not been a member of Opus Dei? I think the Sheppard murderers would have been far less likely to kill had they just left Church while I don't see how being secular would have prevented Ames from spying.

I've heard arguments by atheists that the opposite is true. One attempt is based on the fact that most people in prison believe in God while few are secular-concluding, therefore that religious people commit more crime. Now, the question shouldn't be whether they believe in God, for belief in God is a default position; people believe in God unless they make a conscious decision not to. The question should be whether they ever thought about religion. In other words, did the criminals regularly attend Church before they committed crime? Did the people in the criminal's community who went to Church commit as much crime as those who did? It's only appropriate to compare people who actively practice their faith with people who consciously don't. Another day, I will try to reconcile the declining murder rate in Europe over 500 years with the decline in faith as expressed in the book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Anyways, I hope whatever effected my children spreads.

Let me know about your experience with people who have converted. Did they become better or worse?