Has there every been a more perfect study than this one? The German company Atheist Shoes noticed that many of its packages shipped to the United States were taking longer than normal to reach their destinations. They began to suspect that United States Postal Service employees were deliberately "losing" Atheist shipments- in retaliation, perhaps, for the godless labeling on the boxes. So, Atheist ran an experiment. They shipped 178 packages to 89 people in the United States. Each person received two packages, one clearly marked Atheist, the other, not. The results, which Atheist describes in a fun infographic on its website (detail below) were flabbergasting: Atheist-branded packages took, on average, 3 days longer to reach their destinations and were 10 times more likely to disappear altogether. And in one extreme case, the Atheist-branded package sent to a customer in Michigan took 37 days longer to arrive than its secular counterpart.

UPDATE 3/28:Commenters on the Atheist Shoes study have noted that the holdup could be with customs- either in the E.U. or the U.S.- rather than the USPS. Atheist Shoes replies (also in the comments section) that they have no similar delays with international packages to non-U.S. countries, leading them to conclude the problem doesn't lie with E.U. customs. If it is U.S. customs that's behind the delays for the atheist-branded packages, a number of different mechanisms could explain why, including: A) Vigilante customs officials are deliberately sidetracking packages; or B) There's a kind of cognitive bias at work where customs officials know they have to inspect X number of packages in an hour and they're more likely to pull out packages with noticeable packaging characteristics than packages with neutral packaging characteristics. See all comments here.