What are people like this – educated, articulate, and seemingly very rational – doing in a prison in the first place?

Smarts, education, rationality – these things do not make you less likely to break the law. Just less likely to end up in prison when you do.
Beyond that … not everyone in prison is guilty, and as pointed out by others, 80.9% are in for non-violent crimes.

In my experience, they weren’t jailhouse converts so much as they were “backsliders” who had been Christians earlier in life, then fell in “with a bad crowd” and betrayed their religious teaching.

Many Americans describe themselves as adhering to a particular religious tradition because that is the tradition in which they were raised. Even people who only go to church on Christmas and Easter if they are visiting their parents will describe themselves as Christian. Doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Your experience also should have taught you that convicts can and will lie about anything and everything.

Two words: jaihouse converts

I did several stints in the prison ministry at my church when I was religious. I’ll tell you that this letter-writer is correct – the majority of inmates proclaim themselves to be Christians.

In my experience, they weren’t jailhouse converts so much as they were “backsliders” who had been Christians earlier in life, then fell in “with a bad crowd” and betrayed their religious teaching.

I join the letter-writer in his mystification: If Christianity is worth its salt, why does it fail so often and so miserably to transform the lives of its followers? Christians are just as likely to commit crimes, get divorced, cheat on their taxes, be cruel and dismissive as the rest of the population. Their good deeds are well and good, but they’re matched by non-Christian religious people and by secular people.

The myth of Christianity as a positive, transformative power in this world is busted. And the fantasy of its paying off in the “afterlife” is absurd.

Most all of it circles back to my questioning what so many Christians are doing here in the first place. If the Christian tenets had been properly applied in their lives prior to their incarcerations then shouldn’t they not be here in the first place?</blockquote>

Two words: jaihouse converts

It’s in this latter spirit that I find intriguing the possibility of counseling to prisoners. Only a tiny proportion of prisoners are professed atheists, but I think that offering counseling through a prism of non-belief could be an important part of offering alternatives to religious backing (like the omnipresent evangelizing in prisons). I think that prisoners could benefit from knowing that you have only one life to live, so you better do it right. Knowing that murder is especially heinous because it destroys a person utterly, and that there is no “father” who will straighten it all out in the end, that humans have a PERSONAL responsibility to do things right, is important.

Can I just point out that only a minority of Asatruar are involved in racist activities? There are two distinct camps; those who belong to neo-nazi asatru organisations and, at best, deny membership to people of non-european lineage; and the more common hippy pagan liberalist asatruar.

Asatru does not automatically equal racism. Thanks.

Also, I am also in the camp of wondering what such a well-read, intelligent, and sane individual did to wind up jail. Oh well, it isn’t important.