Mexican Mafia's Wages Of Sin Catholic Bishop Roman Godinez sparked controversy this week when he admitted that Mexican drug gangs regularly donate money to local churches, and caused even more fuss when he suggested the cash became 'purified' once the church got hold of it. "Just because the origin of the money is bad doesn't mean you have to burn it," Bishop Godinez from the central state of Aguascalientes told the Bradenton Herald, "Instead, you have to transform it. . . We live on this, on the offerings of the faithful." The scandal emerged soon after Mexico's oldest newspaper El Manana reported that some drug gangs such as the notorious Zetas have adopted certain Old Testament style practises including feeding victims to lions which they mentioned in a piece revealing that journalists also now targets for assassination. "Drug battles have become bloodier, and gangs have no code of ethics," El Manana's managing editor Daniel Rosas complained, "They don't respect human life; why should they respect reporters?" (Lexington Herald-Leader) Both reports matched the findings of a new study published in the Journal of Religion and Society examining Christian fundamentalist claims that religious belief reduces criminality, which instead concluded that America's god-fearing communities are much more crime ridden than secular ones, 'sometimes spectacularly so'. "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and adult mortality, STD (sexually transmitted diseases), infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion," said study author Gregory Paul. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html ('Rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from "uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates . . .')