Nope from my KB only but I wonder why did you think it was from a typewriter You see it's my first post so I want to know if I made a mistake I don't know how to use all the tools available but this one thing I do know :I can type
First of all, human life is more valuable to me than (basically) all those things. Second of all, I'm specifically pointing at how each person values life. Committing suicide is a smaller deal for an atheist than a religious person. LScolaDominates, The burden of proof you're placing on this is ridiculous quite frankly. You don't place that kind of burden on coming to the conclusion that those who practice Islam are so psychotic that they damage their own image more than the media. Something that few outside of the United States would agree with. Your statement was weak and inappropriate. Had you applied the same nitpicking to your initial statement as you had to mine, you wouldn't have made it to begin with. Your shifting of standards though is interesting to me, as it should be to you. Clearly it won't matter to you and you will end with a mocking statement. But I'm happy to have had this discussion with you. Thank you.
Still making unsupported claims, I see. Calm down. If you can't support the claims you are throwing out, just admit it. No need to lash out at me or something I wrote pages back that you completely misunderstood. The difference is I admitted I was wrong. You seem to have no capacity to do so. You just keep digging yourself into a hole, making even more ridiculous statements ("Committing suicide is a smaller deal for an atheist than a religious person") as you go, blithely making assumptions about people who are different than you. Yet another vague snipe job with absolutely no substance or relevance to the discussion at hand. I wish I could say I didn't see that coming.
Sitting under a tree all day having no care sounds simple but try to actually do it. Getting to a Zen state of no mind isn't easy.
Cults and sectarianism though is part of the evolution of all religions. To the point that Asahara started from Buddhism and took it a very different directions I'm not sure though that you can say that he was no longer a Buddhist the same with Koresh. This isn't to defend what they did but I don't think it is as clear cut to such large and diverse religions as Buddhism and Christianity to say definitively that one sect is and one sect isn't a branch of that religion. Different schools of Buddhism have differing interpretation. There is a story of one of the past lifes of Sakyamuni where he was a merchant prince and killed some bandits even though he understood that killing was wrong and the killing wasn't completely under self-defense. There is also the story of the Tibetan monk who killed an anti-Buddhist Tibetan king. Also if war and killing were totally forbidden there never would've been the conquests of Asoka who is credited for spreading Buddhism along with his conquests. I'm pointing all of this out not to bash on Buddhism, especially since I believe in its principles, but because I am uneasy about an idea of Buddhist exceptionalism. I think that leads to misunderstanding about the history and breadth of Buddhism and friction with other religions in terms of saying which is better. (ala this thread)
Ironic, since you would think that human life and all of it's facets would overrule the small suicide rate, but eh. Holistic approaches not really popular with you are they? Anyways, back to the post before...a while back, but eh. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108625/More-Religious-Countries-Lower-Suicide-Rates.aspx Trauma does not equal war necessarily. Countries with higher competition for example will have higher suicide rates. Japan is a perfect case study of this; the modern stress of living in Tokyo+the high homeless rate+all kind of extraneous factors have caused that high suicide rate. Religion is more or less irrelevant in this case. This study is way too simplistic and not strong enough to substantiate any causation, even with a leap of faith, since the only two factors associated don't fit near to encompassing all the biasing factors. Besides which, even studies with 100% correlation cannot indicate causation, so the point is moot anyways. Though, if one were to make a statement out of that, I would be much more inclined to notice the fact that countries that are more religious tend to have lower standards of living. This more or less can be assumed, since we know the most secular nations such as the Scandinavian bloc also are the most prosperous and that extremist Islamic nations repress even the most basic rights for their citizens. I'm not going to use the same flawed study to confirm this but it is food for thought.
ORRrr... Japan has been infamous for suicide since the early days of its history. For different reasons, but it still holds. Alrighty, let's put it this way since I have time today. What would it take in this instance to prove causation to you?
All religions started with a Cult or similar type of group, every single one of them. The one's that caught on, mostly due to the politics of the region just grew from that stage to be more widely accepted. DD
An experiment. Which is almost physically impossible because of the ethical issues involved. But that's one of the fundamentals of psychology and modern social science; you cannot prove causation without isolating the variables and accounting for all biases (placebo effect etc. etc.). If you're going to make leaps of logic based on "common sense" out of correlated factors, go right on ahead, they just won't be considered factual, at least not in the scientific sense of the word. If you find an experiment on this topic, then I'll consider the implications.
Not Islam for sure. That horrible religion has been an absolute plague and nightmare for Iran. I love how Turkey has tried to minimize the influence of that backward religion in the country. Anyone who wants to advance their country in the Middle East should seek to discredit and minimize the impact of Islam. The vast majority of young people in Iran hate Islam as a result of the Islamic thugs running the country. The eventual death of Islam in Iran is the only positive result to come from their reign of terror.
What you are requiring is not even required of the concept of gravity honestly. So, a set of people randomly selected who are under the same conditions (for example)... What else needs to be isolated to attribute the suicide rate, as far as humanly possible, to the religion? Assume genetics is factored in. Just so you don't think I'm pulling your chain, my interest in what you would require to be convinced is overlapping with our discussion. I'm not just shifting the focus or wasting your time. Much appreciated.
Precisely. What he's saying is true to an extent. Islam has been demolished in Iran due to the way it has been run. The youth are unofficially converting out of Islam at ridiculous rates. The majority will still call themselves Muslim, but I've found that a huge majority of Iranian teens are repulsed by Islam. This is similar to women who have traumatic experiences with men, and end up being repulsed by the site of all men.
What I'm requiring might sound kinda b****y, but it's what the scientific establishment requires. That's why we do drug tests before giving out pharmaceuticals and not drug surveys. If you're going to use surveys and polls that provide correlation and use them to prove causation, there is nothing stopping you. It's just lousy science based on inferences. And I'm not easily swayed by lousy science. http://books.google.ca/books?id=4zr...wtHgDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1 There's a good basic article about that.
Double posting, but to explain further, what I'm requiring is almost impossible to find. I expect it to be. If you can find someone who is clever enough to rationalize suicide, I would be very impressed. Science cannot measure and quantify everything. That's why you can't just rush in with studies and research on everything; sometimes science just cannot provide a good answer. That said, with the studies aside, nothing is preventing us from having a moral argument over whether or not atheists are bad for a society. I say that they are good; atheists are the most intellectually honest people in our society. There is no proof for God, so they don't believe in God. simple as that. Organized religion has been a force for both good and terrible evil; atheists, with the numbers and influence they are gaining might be able to balance this system. I happen to also think that having the ability to believe in a higher power that cannot be rationally proved is a sign of maturation, but I despise the way modern organized religion has transformed that need into a quest for influence and followers.
It should be noted that atheism as it was preached under the Soviet Union and Mao also did terrible evil.
^I've mentioned Adam Curtis's Pandora's Box before. He does a great job explaining how the Soviet Union planned to build a rational and technocratic utopia and what resulted from it. Anyone interested could find it on google video. But I'm a history and politics nut, so I enjoy something as boring as that.
On the flip side, the Catholic Church signed a concordat with Hitler and maintained very good relations with Mussolini and Franco. I'm not saying atheism is good either as a significant force...but it's clear already that organized religion doesn't have such a swell track record either. I would be much happier with a balance of atheists and organized religion (which is currently developing) then the current state of religious domination.
