Economies, Religions, and Human Rights (Part 1)

One idea I see brought up by a lot of New Atheists is that increased religiosity is responsible for worsened human rights. It's a damning claim, and one that's rarely substantiated. Despite being an atheist myself, I think it's unfair, and probably false (or at least only coincidentally true). My hypothesis is that income equality and per capita income are drivers for religiosity (inverse) and human rights. While there's no way to show causation for something like this, I do think it's worth actually looking at the data.

Data sources:
Human rights scores: Freedom House.
Income equality: Gini coefficients from the World Bank.
Per capita income and distribution of religions: CIA world factbook.
Religiosity: Gallup Worldview

I'm pretty excited about having skills and time to do this sort of project now. I've wanted to build some sort of model relating some of these factors ever since I took a political science course at ASU with Miki Kittilson. That class was where I was first exposed to most of these data sources.