Suicides more likely to be atheists
- Thread starter S.A.M.
- Start date
Bells
Staff member
I hate having to refer to this site, but I honestly can't be stuffed searching atm:
Yeah, about one a week. Very rare.
And condoned indeed. Cleric uses an honour killing as an example of why a website is bad. Don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like condemnation to me. Does it sound that way to you?
Of course it is.
Keep on sweeping..
No. One side was made up of individuals who recognised the absurdity of laws that denied equal rights to one sex, they being the females. The other side were made up of the religious believers who saw it as a denial of their religious teachings. Read the report. It is quite enlightening.
And yes, women in Islam often use the teachings of Islam to attempt to get equal rights and treatment. Unfortunately for them, they are often preaching to the deaf and the blind, who view women as being somehow subservient and lower than the male. So they can back up their claims all they want. If the men refuse to listen, they have no recourse. Some men use their religion to back up their claims that they are allowed to beat and rape their wives and no one dares to refuse them of that 'right'. I guess that's one way to look at family togetherness I suppose.
I disagree. My response was in that tone to match the tone you originally set with those remarks. The way you put it, family, friends and community only exists in religious communities. When we both know that the reality is vastly different.
What makes you think they can't be bothered? In the West, the elderly parents often want to go to an old people's home. And not everyone does send their elderly parents to such homes. Many do stay with their children until their deaths. Some demand to continue living in their own houses and their children sometimes end up moving very close or in with them to help care for them.
And in some households, they fight to not have them live with them. It is the same in the West as well.
That's because in the West, we tend to have the belief that once a child becomes an adult, they need to learn to fend for themselves instead of forcing their aging parents to continue to cook, clean and wash their clothes for them. We believe that an adult should start to take responsibility for themselves as well as others instead of living off the parents. There are many who do not leave home but continue to live with their parents and allow the parents to continue to baby them.
Indeed.
They are asessing the effects of secular education on suicide ideation and the effects of decreasing religiosity on suicide.
Don't care, not when James quotes Gallup poll data and tells me to apologise for quoting a similar association derived from assumed religiosity or lack of based on same data. I was hardly presenting an original or radical idea.
Not if you factor in that atheists are more likely to condone abortion.
Besides, the fact that increased atheism leads to social disintegration is sufficient reason to avoid it.
Decay of religion in any society has a historical precedent for leading to its dissolution.
Bells
Staff member
In what way?
I think it is evident from a cursory view of society where atheism is on the increase, that individualism takes precedence over community. Objectively, that would, over several generations lead to a breakdown in the ideals that sustain the family unit. Simply because individualism is not compatible with teamwork.
And doing it without controls or reliable data. Apparently they aren't even controlling for theism or accidental death or murder - researchers after your own heart.SAM said:
But the point has been stipulated (your original point, about theism not religion): suppose suicide becomes more common as atheism increases, though still rare, of course. What do you conclude?
Do humans have to believe in a particular form of nonsense in order to be happy in a large society? And if so why?
This, for example, is silly:
As a quick perusal of some group like the Scotch Irish in America will show plainly, even extreme individualism is by no means incompatible with multigenerational family cohesion and loyalty. And it improves social teamwork, by improving flexibility in team formation - it creates the possibility of tight teamwork with nonfamily.SAM said:
This failure to promote out-teaming, let's call it, may explain the difficulties faced by modern forms of government and civilization in the Muslim countries, eh?
Your problems with James, if any, don't fix the problems with such data.SAM said:
Because the root of culture is apparently cult and a study of all nations of the past shows that to understand their social framework, you need to first study the particular form of nonsense they believe in.
As Will Durant says,
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion
The decline in education, social institutions etc, has already begun.
The original topic was theism, SAM. Suicides among atheists.SAM said:
Not to mention that Durant apparently skipped the smaller tribes, such as the Inuit, that appear to have little in the way of religion. Or perhaps he regarded them as not successful in their moral life - they did have a high rate of murder, and were famously open about sex.
But dropping the apparently flexible "atheist" issue, we have another source of dubious assumption. I wonder whether Durant is, as you often are, simply defining "moral life" and spiritual recognition as religion? If whenever one sees people inculcating morals and spiritual views, one sees a religion (and I would go along with that), then the consequent is assumed and the argument is over.
If they decline to the common levels of the fundamentalist theists of the earth, that would indeed be a mark against them.SAM said:
That doesn't answer the question.SAM said:
Please do tell.
Since the data consistently show increased atheism = increased incidence of suicide, for various reasons [acceptance, no religious stigma, blah blah), you are free to make the argument you want. Consistently one sees an increase in suicide and a decrease in birth rate in societies where atheism is on the increase.
Since I don't share your belief that deities and prayers can be athiestic, we will have to agree to disagree here. Its been noted that while rationalists [presumably an euphemism for athiests] consider religion as stagnation, historians point out that the decay of religion in society is a consistent marker of the decline of that nation. Now you may consider atheism to be a religion, I don't, so we've reached an impasse here.
"Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies"
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
Nope.
Suicide rates do not correlate positively with secularity. Life expectancies correlate positively with secularity, and suicide rates correlate positively with life expectancies.
http://www.211bigbend.org/hotlines/suicide/SuicideandtheElderly.pdf
“Suicide rate among elderly rises as people live longer.”
http://www.iol.ie/~afifi/BICNews/Health/health26.htm
But that's exactly what your data on suicide did. Wasn't it? It assigned certain countries as "Christian", "Muslim", "Atheist", etc.
Where was your published peer reviewed research showing that suicide is perpetrated by "practising" atheists?