Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
An alarming trend was revealed yesterday. Despite medical advances and lower deaths by heart disease and cancer, the US life expectancy dropped after years and years of going up. Suicide is a big part of the problem, and the suicide rate has now hit a 50 year high.
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Jeff, are you even remotely aware of reality?
First of all, you need to stop listening to the stupid propaganda your fundamentalist thought control masters are feeding you. Of course they will blame every negative aspect of society on atheism and secularism - which is par for the course. And, it goes without saying that you'll unquestioningly believe these ultra-biased idiots shoving lies down your throat and you won't even consider that what they're saying is misleading and deceptive.
Second, I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with atheism and secularism. The reason is very simple: The United States is the ONLY industrialized nation that has the same degree of religiosity as a Third World impoverished and uneducated nation.
Which means, of course, if we're going to start laying blame at one group's feet, it would be far more logical that Christianity and its bigotry and hatreds as being the real cause. Because they are the ones with all of the political clout and access to the airwaves to spew their poison into the minds of our citizenry.
You keep bring up suicides and blaming it on atheists - but just like with claiming Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all committed their atrocies due to their atheism, you have no problem distorting reality by making correlations that simply do not exist.
I read your article and guess what:
ATHEISM AND SECULARISM WERE NEVER MENTIONED AS A REASON FOR THE INCREASED SUICIDE RATE!!!!
Normally I don't like shouting - but in this case writing in all-caps seemed necessary to hammer it into your brain that you are deliberately, intentionally, and willfully lying about your premise.
Religiosity, atheism, secularism - NONE of those things were either mentioned or implied as being an underlying cause. AT ALL.
You should be ashamed of yourself for posting this kind of propagandistic garbage - I bet you didn't even read the article yourself. You just made a whopping assumption that an increased suicide rate (which was only ONE of the 10 major causes of death in the USA) was due largely because of some mythical atheistic and secular America.
I'd also remind you that when you're this flagrantly dishonest, you WILL have to stand in front of YOUR creator and explain to him why you chose to lie about this, Jeff. No doubt your God knows your forum transgressions right along with all of your other ones.
And, finally, this is why I loathe your kind of believer. You claim to have the moral high ground while boldly and transparently demonstrating your own immorality as if being immoral were some kind of badge of honor.
https://www.al.com/news/2018/11/us-s...xpectancy.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
This is the world atheism and secularism as created.
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No it's not.
Lies. Lies. More lies. The article proves you're not telling the truth.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
More division,
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Yes, due to political issues - not religion vs. atheism issues. We have the most divisive president in American history staining the the reputation of the Office right now. People are depressed as hell that so many Americans were STUPID enough to elect the man.
And guess who helped put him there? Yeah. People like YOU. Fundies and evangelicals who pretend to be oh so moral - and have no qualms about putting a proven womanizer, misogynist, bigot, and racist into office - even pedophiles are better than even the best Democrat. Just one more example of how the devoutly religious - already programmed to accept things without evidence and to recreate reality to fit their own narrative - bought into all the GOP lies.
NOTHING TO DO WITH ATHEISM. It has everything to do with fundamentalisms utter lack of morality.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
more hopeless,
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Again, thanks to the fundevantelist crowd selling out their humanity and morality in the hopes of banning gay marriage and illegalizing abortion, we have a government in utter shambles. The article even says explicitly that divisive politics has played a significant role.
What HASN'T played a significant role? Oh right - atheism and secularism.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
more conflict, less tolerance and less empathy.
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These three make me sick. How you can even attempt to blame these things on atheism is such a bold lie that I'm amazed you even tried to say it.
Your religion has precisely ZERO of the last two, but buckets of the first. Tons of conflict but not a single ounce, not even a nanoliter of tolerance and empathy. Even your anti-abortion schtick isn't born of any sort of compassion or empathy - because the moment those unwanted babies hit the free air of earth, you abandon them to whatever fate awaits them. In a very literal sense, a clump of cells or a few DNA strands are more important to you than a living, breathing, self-aware, pain-feeling human being. There is absolutely NOTHING to be admired there.
All you folks want to do is force everyone to bow to your God, to follow blindly and dumbly your holy book, and to ban, censor, restrict, and limit our choices and our freedoms until all that's left is to walk the razor thin line you've painted for us.
What disgusts me is how your beliefs say that because you're pro-birth (you're not at all pro-life), and hand out some cheap toys to kids at Christmas or some old winter coats to the homeless, you are brimming with morality, empathy, and compassion.
And yet YOUR side is complicit in what amounts to a secret genocide right here in America - whereby Trump and his GOP pals tried to pass health care reform that was so egregious that it would have severed access to health care for 27 million and Americans and would have completely gutted the Medicaid program, leaving hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people with no way to pay for their treatments. Tens of thousands would have died had those reforms been passed - and tens of thousands more would have committed suicide due to the unbearable pain and suffering that their treatments once abated. Treatments that they can no longer get.
And yet you have the goddamn temerity to blame atheism for hopelessness, suffering, and suicide? Fundevangelists like yourself are so blinded and poisoned by their religion that they can't even see what harm they cause - and I'm not altogether sure they'd care even if they did.
But I am convinced that the Trump government together with certain corporate interests are waging an indirect genocide against our country's poor and disabled citizens, hoping to kill them off by stripping them of any access to the so-called "privilege" of health care. Believe me, I have evidence, but I won't get into it here.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
People have bought into the lie that there is no God, and no purpose to live.
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Again. Lies. The article doesn't say this at all.
Oh and bwahahahaha! Why is it that when an atheist posts an article showing a drop in religion, you people are right there trying to counter it with statistics that show how religion is growing.
But when it comes to suicide, somehow now there's this mass conversion to atheism - JUST so you can blame atheism on all the deaths.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you can see plainly how disgustingly disingenuous this all is. The complete lack of mention of religion being a silent and damning argument against EVERYTHING Jeff has to say in his post.
You, Jeff, must spend half the day begging your God for forgiveness just for your forum antics alone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
We are merely souless flesh and bone here to consume resources then die and rot. The vast majority of us will be completely forgotten from the next generations that get their turn at living.
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That's right. Unless you become a major historical figure, you WILL be forgotten by future generations. I don't give a damn what religion you are.
Once there is no one left alive who remembers you - you are forgotten. And that's all there is to it.
It is unavoidable. A great-great-great grandson is not going to remember his great-great-great grandfather. If you want to be at all "remembered" by future generations, all you can do is write your autobiography and pass it down through the generations in the hopes that your descendants will read it. Otherwise, your memory is as much fodder for worms as your physical body. Don't like it? Tough.
Because that is inescapable reality.
Besides, what does God do to make our lives more meaningful than they are without a god? Well, if your idea of purpose is servitude and slavery, then go ahead and keep worshiping. After all, without running around putting God before your friends, family, and loved ones, what purpose would you have?
But I can understand to some degree. Those of us who are free thinkers have the mental capacity to give ourselves our OWN purpose - without needing a celestial dictator to assign us a purpose. After all, what the HELL is the point of free will if we can't deduce for ourselves our purpose instead of just assuming our purpose is to merely do whatever God wants us to do, our own lives be damned.
Pathetic, really.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
And the research has shown a direct link between atheism and suicide.
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And thank you, Jeff, for your typically religious binary thinking. One thing zealous religious belief does to the brain is to make it incapable of nuanced thinking. Everything is a superlative, an absolute, an extreme, or a hyperbole. In fact, to a religious zealot, there is no "bell" in a bell curve at all because the middle has been taken out altogether. Only the two outlying extemes are ever seen.
In the case of this article, Jeff here wants to put forward the idea that this study is proof positive that atheism is the root cause of the vast majority of suicides in this country.
However, all this article says is that there were more suicides among the non-religious than among the religious. The reasons for that is obvious even without reading it:
1) Religions threaten depressed people with HELL if they kill themselves - because that's their idea of support.
2) Religions do offer a social network, and having such a network does help keep a person from committing suicide. But that has nothing to do with religion, God, or whether you believe in God. What's important is the social networking - which can be achieved through entirely secular means.
Jeff, of course, will try to blather nonsense about how it was the religion that made the difference when it actually wasn't. It was the people.
AND because many Christians have done an excellent job of demonizing, vilifying, and preaching hatred of and against atheists, non-believers often end up isolated, shunned, expelled, ostricized, kicked out of, and otherwise marginalized from mainstream society.
Which is to say that the religious actually FACILITATE suicide among non-believers thanks to the intolerance, bigotry, and outright hatred of atheists shown by the devoutly religious. Even getting blamed for our own suicide rate is just another example of the bullshyte we atheists have to deal with all the time.
Again, it's not the lack of religion that causes non-believers to commit suicide in larger numbers. It's because of the way the religious treat them.
And so ...
Step 1: A person comes 'out of the closet' as an atheist
Step 2: Parents disown them, kick him out of the house
Step 3: The new atheist is shunned by their community, ostracized by friends and extended family
Step 4: They are bullied in school, harassed at work; some atheists will even lose their jobs
Step 5: Spouses divorce them
Step 6: Atheist is now jobless, homeless, and completely alone, living in a shelter, sleeping on the street
Step 7: Atheist commits suicide
Step 8: Religious blow-hards like Jeff blame atheism for suicides - rather than where the blame really belongs - religion itself.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi...jp.161.12.2303
Then there are the aspects of the article itself:
Problem 1: Depressed inpatients (N=371) who reported belonging to one specific religion or described themselves as having no religious affiliation were compared in terms of their demographic and clinical characteristics.
Note the word in bold face. Uh huh. These people were depressed, i.e. they suffered from Depression. There is no indication here HOW they became depressed or what caused it. Jeff, of course, is happy to assume that all depression was caused by a lack of God in their lives and this is what led to their suicide.
No, their depression led to their suicide. There are plenty of happy, well-adjusted atheists out there who do not commit suicide because they don't suffer from depression.
As I said: The only things religion gives a depressed person is:
1) A social network of people who ostensibly care about them
2) An irrational fear of hell should they kill themselves
Which essentially means the only thing keeping these people from killing themselves is peer pressure and fear. I doubt any good therapist would ever claim those two things are very good forms of therapy because, while those things might stop a suicide, they do NOTHING to help a person get better.
Problem 2:
Suicide rates are lower in religious countries than in secular ones (1, 2). Some of this difference may be due to underreporting in religious countries because of concerns over stigma (3).
Yep. Can't really believe the statistics. The article itself says as much. Suicides are underreported because of the horrific intolerance of religious belief. I personally have known half a dozen people who have committed suicide - but do you think that's what was said in their obituaries? Of course not. Their cause of death was always worded like: "John died unexpectedly yesterday in his home" or "Jill died suddenly after battling an illness .."
But they never come out and say they killed themselves because *gasp* that would be improper.
And because Christian towns and villages are so intolerant even with each other, families will do damn near anything to prevent anyone else knowing that their kids committed suicide - because then you are forever stigmatized as the family with a dead kid in hell. And then their parenting skills are called into question and, worse still, their faith and relationship with God is criticized and shoved under a microscope. Yeah, that's the Christian way of life.
So who REALLY knows if suicide rates are higher among the non-religious as opposed to the religious?
Yet, some of the difference may be real, although it is not known whether the negative association between religion and suicide is due to its integrative benefits
There you go. Even the article itself says that there is no conclusive evidence that religion itself kept people from committing suicde. Jeff, of course, will have us believe that it was God and Jaysus who kept people from committing suicide - but it wasn't.
It was the social networking religion can and often does provide - and the good ol' fashioned hell threat.
And of course the social ostracization and familial and community strife becoming a non-believer often causes people who live in certain areas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
That's the bed you made, so now you can get to lie in it.
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No, that's the bed YOU made ... all by yourself. And you turned it into a bed of lies.
Yeah, you obviously lied a lot in your bed. If you know what I mean.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
It is just sad that atheists dedicate so much time out of the few short decades we get in life into tearing down an institution that gives hope and healing to the masses.
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No, what's sad is when people decided that "lying for Jesus" was perfectly moral - when they decided it was accetable behavior. Like I said, according to your beliefs, one day you will have to stand before your creator and explain to him why you felt the need to lie and distort information to fit your own anti-atheist propagandistic agenda.
Does it give hope and healing to the masses? Sure - as long as they walk that razor's edge that fundamentalisim demands they walk. Most of the time, though, they're scared half to death of going to hell, and so they obediently do as they are told to avoid the Lake of Fire. They are told who to vote for, which party to back, what policies to endorse all the way down to how they can dress. The more power you give to religion, the more power it demands.
And we're here to stop that from happening. We're not going away.
In fact, you don't even need religion or God to believe in an afterlife - which means an atheist doesn't even have to give up hope that there is a better place beyond the veil. And any afterlife WE come up with is just as likely to be real as any of the crap in the Bible.
The only difference is that we atheists would believe in a "come one, come all" paradise that includes everyone of all beliefs - even yours. Because that's just the way we are. Unlike you who believes that only people in your club go to Heaven and worship mewling praises at God's feet for eternity. I could come up with a better afterlife in 1.28 nanoseconds. In fact, I could come up with a better afterlife so quickly that I would be typing it faster than my neurons could fire.
Damn near ANYTHING is better than that exclusive Heaven of yours - which ends your life with no purpose since a perfect place gives you no impetus to DO anything. Except sit there while people you love and care about are burning in a raging furnace forever and ever. Yeah - how do you juxtapose that, hmm?
You're supposed to be happy as pigs in shyte while people are being tortured. What kind of sicko eternity is that?
Oh yeah. And at least we won't lie about it.
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