I can’t tell you how many times this little bit of info could have saved me some past hardships.

According to an article on Quartz, a presentation at the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making revealed that the words people use when they are applying for a loan says a lot about their emotions and personalities. The findings were based upon “18,000 loan requests made between 2007 and 2008 through US peer-to-peer lending website Prosper,” and focused on the most frequent words used in “the 33% of loans from that timeframe that eventually went into default.”

Among the words most used by individuals who were likely to repay their loans were: worth, wedding, graduate, student loan, and college.

Among the words most used by defaulters were: mistake, hospital, payday loan, lost, and please help. At the top of the list, the researchers found:

“The word God was 2.2 times more likely to appear in a loan application where the borrower eventually defaulted.”

A few on the interwebs have thrown this report around as proof that religious people are less likely to pay their bills. However, it seems pretty clear to me that it is just evidence that poorer people are more likely to reach out to God in time of need.

I’ve always said that religion is a wonderful “circuit breaker.” When you are desperate and life is out of control, you pop the switch, throw up your hands, and “trust God.” As faulty and superstitious as this might be, this is perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to the spread of reason. It is much easier to be a freethinker when you don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from.

Perhaps it is time that we in the freethought community begin exerting as much effort to provide relief for those in poverty as we do trying to prove ourselves right.

Anybody want to loan me a couple bucks to make that happen? I swear to Darwin that I will gladly pay you Tuesday.

Brother Richard

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