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...Funny how atheists have no problem using personal antecedotes as evidence when it suits your argument. Hypocrisy at its finest.
There's nothing wrong with using personal anecdotes, particularly as examples of some larger premise. However, personal anecdotes rarely prove anything since they are not reliable. And one of the reasons is that most people, when they are telling a personal anecdote...well, let's say they dress it up nicely to better make their point. And personal anecdotes rarely reach that "beyond a reasonable doubt" bar.
No one thinks that truth is relative. What you lament is the passing of that time when religious claims were unquestioningly accepted. Personal revelation is one of the weakest forms of evidence. "God told/showed me this" is roughly on par with "Aliens kidnapped me and took me on a starship tour of Alpha Centauri." Each might be true, but the mere claim is nothing but the weakest sauce.
There simply is less acceptance of baseless claims that there used to be, and that is an obvious problem for promulgators of and adherents to baseless claims. The Enlightenment and its embrace of reason has always spelled the continued erosion of religion's chokehold on society. That's why sources of critical thought have always been opposed by religion, and it's why today fundamentalist religiosity strongly correlates with dislike and fear of education.
The bygone era whose passage you lament is one where non-Christians (and, not incidentally, women and non-whites and non-straights) knew their place. That place was to sit down and shut up and to not rock the boat, lest they be subject to the social (and often legal) consequences. The bullying that in yesteryear kept almost all atheists in the closet doesn't work so much anymore. The anti-atheist stigma, while still existing, has greatly diminished. You dislike this liberty of thought and expression. You know that your beliefs cannot survive in the marketplace of ideas and examination.
So you're reduced to silliness like the strawman frenzy you posted above.
Me too. Husband and wife. Both doctors to the Saudi Royal family.
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He loves it there and enjoys a high standard of living including free meals and laundry service at his employer compound.
Same for my friends...and they are rarely allowed to go outside the hospital where they work or the compound where they live unless it's to the airport to fly back and forth.
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The people there are very friendly and laid back. Zero crime.
More to do with getting your hands chopped off or hanged rather that religion.
So, I'm sure that it's nice and clean in your friends compound but he should get outside a bit. Oh wait! That's right - he probably can't can he!
Woman can drive? Yes...now. My friends wife can drive too - providing there is a male with her and when she comes home on holiday and then returns to Saudi Arabia, she is put into a 'cage' at the airport along with all other unaccompanied women and has to stay there until a male comes to 'claim' her.
So you look forward to the day of even higher suicide rates and moral conflicts? I don't.
I love how your side has no problem correlating a lack of religion with happiness yet if I do the exact same thing with the suicide rate, all I get is correlation is not causation shield from atheists.
Ok, let me punch a big hole in that one. I have a friend who lives in Saudi Arabia. He loves it there and enjoys a high standard of living including free meals and laundry service at his employer compound. The people there are very friendly and laid back. Zero crime. No homeless population or litter. The cities have all the modern conveniences including chains like Starbucks. Most people there just want to work and provide for their families. Yet it is one of the most religious countries in the world with society observing prayer times throughout the day. Israel is another country I would love to live in and it has holy sites for the world's three major religions. South Korea has a strong Christian population and it is a good country as well.
Predictably, Jeff serves up some dogma not backed by ... well, reality.
States with the highest suicide rates include highly religious places such as Arkansas, New Mexico and West Virginia, as well as comparatively secular places such as Alaska and the Mountain West.
And where there is some correlation, it isn't in Jeff's favor. The ten states with the lowest suicide rates include a cluster of seven (CT, DE, MA, MD, NJ, NY, RI) in the Northeast, the most irreligious part of the United States (the other three are CA, IL, TX).
As usual, Jeff just serves up some claim back by an anecdote (he actually thinks this is statistically meaningful) and ignores data-sets. A classic example is the highlighted bit about South Korea above - Jeff is apparently oblivious to the fact that South Korea has the 4th-highest suicide rate in the world. And he's ignorant of that fact because it never occurs to Jeff to actually investigate the veracity of this off-the-cuff assumptions. Or, maybe it does occur to him, but he's learned that ignorance is more blissful than having reality trample all over the way he wants things to be. http://worldpopulationreview.com/cou...ate-by-country
The United States was a lot more religious during the Civil War - now that was self-destructive.
Oh, and the whole slavery thing. Yeah, that came along with the 'more religious' bit. So too did the Jim Crow and lynchings that followed. But, hey, that's cool because at least the lynchers went to church a lot!
That is your Rabbit trail that I'm not going down.
Let us look at your cherry picked passage in full.
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). 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 (such as social cohesion, as proposed by Durkheim in 1951 [4]) or to the moral imperatives of religious belief, given its prohibitions against suicidal behavior (1, 5–7).
So we do not know if atheism is a cause for suicide (insufficient data), and we do not know if it is the lack of community (social cohesion) that is the problem.
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Now how about this, thinking about suicide when depressed.
Effect of Religious Affiliation in Subjects With Depression
Subjects with no religious affiliation were more often lifetime suicide attempters, reported more suicidal ideation, and were more likely to have first-degree relatives who had committed suicide than religiously affiliated subjects. The religiously affiliated and unaffiliated subjects did not differ in terms of gender, race, education, or income. Religiously unaffiliated subjects were younger, less often married, and less often had children.
No religious affiliation does NOT mean atheist, it means they are not affiliated to a religion. So they could be religious. Note also that the non-affiliates were also more likely to be single, young and childless. Which means any of these could be the reason or a contributing factor.
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What about this, people who thought about suicide.
The final model with suicidal ideation as the outcome variable and age, aggression, responsibility to family, religious affiliation, and moral objections to suicide as the independent variables revealed that high aggression scores, low moral objections to suicide, and younger age were significantly and independently associated with suicidal ideation. Religious affiliation and responsibility to family were not (Table 4).
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How about this.
Our findings suggest that assessment of presence or absence of religious affiliation, regardless of denomination, may be more useful. Rather, lack of affiliation may be a risk factor for suicidal acts.
So here it is only talking about religious people.
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How about this.
Religious commitment promotes social ties and reduces alienation(33). We found weaker family ties in religiously unaffiliated subjects, and family members are reported to be more likely to provide reliable emotional support, nurturance, and reassurance of worth (37).
Being in a club also promotes social ties and provides support. Think of the military, or biker clubs, two areas where mutual support is very strong.
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I am not even English, yet I can read what this is saying and understand the implications. Why do you have a problem doing this with the links you provide?
Cue misrepresenting my analysis as making excuses.
Clearly, Jeff didn't bother to read past the first paragraph.
Indeed. Yet another link that does not support his argument. Which he will later conveniently forget.
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