Personally I do not believe that religion could somehow affect human health. But people can convince themselves in all sorts of miracles. Therefore, religious people think that it is God who makes them healthy

Why do people who subscribe to religion tend to live longer than the rest of us?

That’s a question Zachary Zimmer, Mount Saint Vincent University’s new Canada research chair in global aging and community, is attempting to answer with a global study looking at data from the United States, Europe and Asia.

“People who are religious tend to live longer and be healthier than people who are not,” Zimmer told Local Xpress.

“Most of this comes from studies that have been conducted in the United States. In places where different kinds of religions are predominant, there hasn’t been as much research.”

One year into the three-year project, he hopes to eventually determine whether the same trend bears out around the world, including Canada.

“What’s not really known is whether this link is, first of all, consistent across different forms of religion, different degrees of religiosity and in different places around the world,” said Zimmer, a Manitoba native who just moved back to Canada after stints in New York, Utah, Nevada and California.

“What we’re looking at particularly in this study is a health outcome that we call health expectancy, which has more to do with quality of life than length of life,” said Zimmer

A Florida city was quick to show how serious it is about its new homeless feeding ban by making an example out of a 90-year-old advocate who’s been helping the hungry for two decades.

On Sunday police cited two Christian ministers and volunteer Arnold Abbott, 90, who runs the advocacy group, Love The Neighbor, Local 10 News reported.

The three served less than a handful of the 300 meals they prepared before the police run in, according to the Sentinel.

They each now face 60 days in jail and $500 fines.

“These are the poorest of the poor, they have nothing, they don’t have a roof over their heads,” Abbott, who plans on suing the city, told Local 10 News. “How do you turn them away?”

Members of the organization Food Not Bombs were in good spirits as they passed out corn on the cob, rice, beans and other vegetarian dishes to the homeless and hungry in an Orlando park. This cheer was interrupted when police officers on bicycles arrived and arrested five of the volunteers.

This is not the first time this scene has played out for members of Food Not Bombs.

Since June 1, a dozen members of the group have been arrested for violating a new Orlando city ordinance that prohibits sharing food with large groups in downtown parks more than twice a year.

The mayor of Orlando even branded them “food terrorists.”

It would be difficult to convince the staff of a Catholic soup kitchen feeding the homeless that they are actually helping the U.S. economy, but that is exactly what an academic journal reports in its study on the economic impact of America’s churches. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion found that religious communities contribute $1.2 trillion each year to the American economy.

These contributions range from the traditional economic drivers of any business to charitable giving, caring for the sick and poor, education and other kinds of services. That is more than the annual revenues of the top 10 tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Google, combined. And if the $1.2 trillion is viewed in terms of the Gross Domestic Product, religion in the U.S. would be ranked as the 15th-largest national economy in the world.

The study looked at the 344,894 congregations in the country, from 236 religious denominations (217 are Christian, and the rest include everything from Shinto to Zoroastrianism). What it discovered was that believers are not only contributing massively to the economy, but they are incredibly generous, too. Despite declining religious affiliation in the U.S. population, religious communities have actually tripled the amount of money spent on social programs in the last 15 years, donating $9 billion to the cause.

At a time when the relevance of faith is being questioned by media elites and the government, and when believers — Christians, above all — are being ridiculed and pushed out of the public square, there is now tangible evidence of the practical value that the mere presence of faith offers to America. Believers are a vital and vibrant part of the economic and social life of the United States, as vital and vibrant as at any time in American history.

The Stanford Children’s Health Gender Clinic now provides hormonal, psycho-social, and gynecologic services for gender non-conforming youth in the Bay Area. The clinic officially opened in Sunnyvale on July 1 2016.
...
Now, the Gender Clinic gives patients and their families a one-stop shop for multidisciplinary health. A pediatric endocrinologist, urologist, gynecologist, along with an adolescent medicine specialist and social worker all work together in the new clinic.
...

"There are usually two phases of hormone treatment," Dr. Tandy Aye said.

"One is to kind of stop puberty when puberty begins in young children. It's to kind of halt it so that the child doesn't experience the wrong puberty, the biological puberty, and it should be the one that they identify with."

The "halt" Aye says gives patients and their parents time to process what is happening and to continue to make decisions before the second round of hormones.

"Around age 16 and sometimes younger that's when what we call the cross-sex hormones get added into so they can make that transition," Aye said

The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.
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Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child....
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According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.
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Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBTQ – affirming countries. What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?
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Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a small, socially conservative advocacy group of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals in the United States.

The group was founded in 2002 by a group of pediatricians, including Joseph Zanga, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)...

ACPeds describes itself as "a national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children... committed to fulfilling its mission by producing sound policy, based upon the best available research, to assist parents and to influence society in the endeavor of childrearing."

Zanga has described it as a group with Judeo-Christian, traditional values.

"2 Kinds?"  Really?
...

Can we please stop making generalizations about other people on BCT?

Could not agree more -- OP / illustration is ignorant, inflammatory & offensive.

There is grumbling in progressive circles over polls showing that Orthodox (Torah observant) Jews will vote for Trump. Among non-Orthodox Jews, Hillary beats Trump by 66 to 23 percent. Among the Orthodox, Trump beats her 66 to 22 percent. In New York, Hillary scores 61 to 19 percent among Jews, but among Orthodox Jews, Trump wins 50% of the vote while Hillary lags at 21%.  

It’s no wonder then that Jewish Democrats for Trump is largely targeting Orthodox Jewish voters.

A newly published study from the University of Copenhagen has confirmed a link between hormonal contraceptives and depression. The largest of its kind, with one million Danish women between the ages of 15 and 34 tracked for a total of 13 years, it’s the kind of study that women such as me, who have experienced the side-effects of birth control-induced depression first hand, have been waiting for.

Women taking pill more likely to be treated for depression, study finds Researchers found that women taking the combined oral contraceptive were 23% more likely to be diagnosed with depression and those using progestin-only pills (also known as “the mini-pill”) were 34% more likely. Teens were at the greatest risk of depression, with an 80% increase when taking the combined pill, and that risk is two-fold with the progestin-only pill. In addition, other hormone-based methods commonly offered to women seeking an alternative to the pill – such as the hormonal IUS/coil, the patch and the ring – were shown to increase depression at a rate much higher than either kind of oral contraceptives.

In recent years we’ve seen efforts from the NHS and family planning organisations to encourage teens to use these so-called LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), primarily because they eliminate the need to remember to take a pill every day, but also due to the fact they’re commonly believed to have less severe potential side-effects than the pill. The new research suggests this practice is misguided. We already know that those with pre-existing depression may find the pill worsens their symptoms, and if teens were at greater risk of depression, then continuing this practice would be negligent

The researchers note that, because GPs are less likely to prescribe the pill to women who already have depression and because women who do experience depression on the pill are more likely to stop taking it, this study probably underestimates the potential negative affect that hormonal contraceptives can have on mental health.

The first sightings occurred in November 1944, when pilots flying over Germany by night reported seeing fast-moving round glowing objects following their aircraft. The objects were variously described as fiery, and glowing red, white, or orange. Some pilots described them as resembling Christmas tree lights and reported that they seemed to toy with the aircraft, making wild turns before simply vanishing. Pilots and aircrew reported that the objects flew formation with their aircraft and behaved as if under intelligent control, but never displayed hostile behavior. However, they could not be outmaneuvered or shot down. The phenomenon was so widespread that the lights earned a name – in the European Theater of Operations they were often called "kraut fireballs" but for the most part called "foo-fighters". The military took the sightings seriously, suspecting that the mysterious sightings might be secret German weapons, but further investigation revealed that German and Japanese pilots had reported similar sightings

The X-10 Graphite Reactor was the first reactor designed and built for continuous operation. It was built during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project... The reactor went critical on November 4, 1943, and produced its first plutonium in early 1944. It supplied the Los Alamos Laboratory with its first significant amounts of plutonium, and its first reactor-bred product. Studies of these samples heavily influenced bomb design.

A ban on nuclear reactors in orbit could be verified using the tremendous flux of gamma rays and positrons that such reactors emit when operating. Indeed, these radiations already constitute a significant background for orbiting gamma-ray
astronomical satellites.

In this paper, we estimate the gamma-ray flux from reactors on spacecraft, using the design parameters for the US SP-100 space reactor as an example. We then summarize the sensitivities of several existing and planned gamma-ray detectors.

Green fireballs are a type of unidentified flying object which have been sighted in the sky since the late 1940s.[1] Early sightings primarily occurred in the southwestern United States, particularly in New Mexico.[2][3][4] They were once of notable concern to the US government because they were often clustered around sensitive research and military installations, such as Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratory, then Sandia base.

Meteor expert Dr. Lincoln LaPaz headed much of the investigation into the fireballs on behalf of the military. LaPaz's conclusion was that the objects displayed too many anomalous characteristics to be a type of meteor and instead were artificial, perhaps secret Russian spy devices... The green fireballs were seen by many people of high repute including LaPaz, distinguished Los Alamos scientists, Kirtland AFB intelligence officers and Air Command Defense personnel.[5] ...

Perhaps the most graphic example occurred during the "Buster series" of atomic tests on November 1 and 5, 1951, which were accompanied by so many reported green fireball sightings in states affected by fallout, that even the New York Times carried a story on November 9, "Southwest's 7 Fireballs in 11 Days Called 'Without Parallel in History'." Dr. LaPaz was widely quoted saying, "There has never been a rate of meteorite fall in history that has been one-fifth as high as the present fall. If that rate should continue, I would suspect the phenomenon is not natural... [they] don't behave like ordinary meteorites at all."

Initially the green fireballs were reported in Arizona and New Mexico as the fallout clouds left Nevada, but as the clouds spread out and drifted further east, south, and north, green fireball sightings then followed in Texas, northern Mexico, Iowa, Kansas, Indiana, Michigan, and New York. Portions of the fallout also drifted west into the Los Angeles area on November 7, followed the next day by a green fireball sighting there...

Summarizing the rash of fireball sightings in November 1951, Wilson commented, "Some researchers imply that the radioactivity itself was producing the green fireballs, possibly as an electrostatic effect.

Wilson concluded, "We can make one statement of fact: the fireball sightings—green or otherwise—occurred in areas that received radioactive debris from Operation Buster. Was this just coincidence, or a planned occurrence? We simply don't know, so all we can do is to continue to collect data and see if some overwhelmingly convincing pattern emerges." Wilson nonetheless felt the evidence pointed to the fireballs being real, artificial, and those responsible having some sort of agenda."

We may be on the threshold of acquiring godlike capacities... we may reach towards a kind of omniscience we may reach towards a kind of omnipotence... but technology is never going to be able to transform us into divinely loving merciful or compassionate beings. That part the moral dimension... remains a problem remains a choice and in that sense (transhumanism) does not change human history

NASA gets caught faking the ISS... again - Flat Earth

Damn you notbatman et al.! I can't find no logical reason for how that live performance was accomplished given the delay.

the very nature of things shows a gradual breaking down of complexity.

If we consider each lifeform in isolation, then a lifeform appears to be dissipative because energy is input and order is increased in the form of aggregating chemical structures (which comprise the body of that lifeform) that comprise higher energy states than their decompositions.

But that doesn't describe life (as distinct from lifeform) at all. These highly ordered lifeforms are interacting to create the much higher information system of evolution. Each lifeform alone is insignificant to anything on any significant scale, yet evolution has given human society the information content to travel across the solar system in outer space. No single lifeform could have attained that entropy/capability (read on...).

Entropy is not some vague concept. It has a precise mathematical definition which is the sum of the logarithmic relation of the number and probability of the possible configurations (a.k.a. states) in the system, i.e. it is measure of the granularity and uniformness of possibilities in the system, i.e. the availability to fitness (to receive work) of the system.  Mankind could not have achieved such amazing feats without a much larger scope of capability states and more distributed probabilities within that scope. In other words, if all lifeforms were capable of doing only one thing, mankind can't accomplish many things. If lifeforms can't interact to form higher information content, then their input to evolution can be lost and the information content decreases.

If you only focus on the biological lifeforms, you miss the entropic force. Biological lifeforms considered only physically and in isolation from the network effects (and memory of evolution) is just a zero sum game if without the entropic relationship. It is akin to focusing only on the actors of the system and treating the interaction of lifeforms (not in the physical but in the informational and evolutionary memory perspective) here on earth as a closed thermodynamic system.Thermodynamics tells us that entropy depends not only on the net flow of energy but also the work dissipated external to the system. The information content of evolution is orthogonal to the physical work done on earth, so all the energy being input is also being dissipated out of the open information system of evolution.

Considering only lifeforms is as silly as saying the entropy of a software program doesn't increase as its Kolmogorov complexity increases. it is irrelevant that the physical manifestation of that knowledge is highly ordered in the physical world where it is stored or represented. The information content has increased. Any one claims there isn't an interaction between that information content and the real physical world is loony and denies the obvious.

Edit: what is interesting to me is how information content increases as the physical thermodynamics becomes more and more indirectly coupled to the system of the information content. One typically thinks of entropy as decay or decomposition but this process is coincident with an increase in information capacity as the potential number of independent states is greater the less mass/inertia is involved. Again if Professor Stolfi only wants to count atoms, then there is nothing for us to talk about. To argue that the information content of software or evolution doesn't interact with the physical realm doesn't make any sense to me. To argue that information content is bounded by atoms of the lifeforms doesn't make any sense as well, and probably if I take some time to formalize it I will be able to. Heading this direction will likely lead to some unifying discoveries in Physics such as the recent discovery that gravity can be shown mathematically to emerge from the entropic force.

A reader asked me to view the following two hour lecture on geocentrism. He promised me fifty bucks if I was not convinced. I wished I had asked for more. This was painful to sit through.

The man involved, Robert Sungenis, is, to put the matter kindly, a smug and dishonest crackpot without even the zealous honesty the other crackpots, flatearthers and theosophists, tend to radiate.

I was trying to count the number of scientific errors he made, and gave up counting when I realized every statement contained a scientific error but one. (He is correct that the microwave background radiation in space is not symmetrical).

The argument was grossly illogical, merely an assertion that there is a conspiracy theory among scientists to discredit the Bible, and that scientists falsify results and ignore contrary experiments due to personal prejudice.

It haunts and horrifies me that any educated person could be deceived by this man. Robert Sungenis is an uncharismatic version of Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man. Only not as amusing, and without the song and dance.

Here is the lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwx7bYEUIF4&ab_channel=LoneStar1776

Fairness requires me to at least list to the points I found unpersausive.

Professor Harold Hill (as I shall call him hereafter) begins with a fifteen minute explanation of his purpose, which is to show that the Earth is the center of the universe in order to undermine the atheist view that the Earth is in an insignificant area of a vast cosmos.

He repeats this several times, and the argument is never made more logically than this: he rejects anything other than a flatly literal interpretation of the Bible as discrediting the whole of the Bible, so that if an ancient writer speaks of the sun rising or the moon setting, this is support for geocentrism.

The problem with Biblical literalism is that it requires a firmament of water above the atmosphere, plants older than the sun, and the presence of unicorns in the wilderness, leviathans in the sea, and God having hands and feet and wings and so on.

As  Roman Catholic, I am not bound to affirm that every non-scholarly flatfooted literal reading in translation of every passage of the Bible, taken out of context, means what the non-scholar says. So, to me, the idea that even one Christian lost his faith due to the Copernican theory is absurd (or, rather, that only absurd Christians would find this a challenge to their faith) much less that the orbit of the Earth around the sun is the main reason for loss of Christian faith in the modern day. The Copernican theory was not an issue for Christians until the Evengelical movement springing from the Protestant movement, some hundreds of years after the entire Christian world saw no conflict between astronomy and theology. It is a make believe problem believed neither by honest scientists nor by orthodox Christians.

The fight between faith and reason exists only the narrow minds of atheists who worship science without understanding it and heretics who worship the Bible without understanding it: two brands of idolaters, each a mirror reflection of the other.

As an ex-atheist, I solemnly assure you that not a single atheist, no, not one, would give a flying fig over whether geocentrism were proven true. Earth being in the center of the cosmos does not prove God exists, or even hint as much. How many atheist of your acquaintance fell down and worshiped God when the Big Bang became the standard model?

Lucretius the Roman philosopher and poet was an atheist (or, at least, a man who believed the serene gods never interfered in human affairs) and he believed the geocentric model.

Astronomy is not what makes atheist doubt the witness of the Christians. (More likely, it is our lack of charity and godliness that makes them doubt.)

The medieval writers who put Earth in the center of gravity, where are all the heavy, mundane, mortal, and un-divine material fell, regarded the center of the universe as the bottom, where hell was. The Earth’s surface was the roof of hell. The stars were the palaces of the saints and angels, the important part of the universe. We were the sewer.

And, as writers from Chesterton to Lewis have pointed out, in no sober man does the size of the universe show man to be too small for the concern of God, rather than stand in mute witness to His glory.

Man is indeed small in relation to the universe. For that matter, he is small in relation to the nearest tree.

Arguing that heliocentrism moves man from the central position of God’s love to a forgotten corner of the cosmos is as illogical as arguing that Caesar must be a god but Christ cannot be god, because Caesar was in Rome, adorned in purple, whereas Christ was born in a stinking stable in an obscure frontier of the Empire.

Only someone unfamiliar with (or perhaps an enemy of) both Christian humility and scientific honesty could make such a stupid argument as to claim heliocentrism erodes faith and geocentrism will restore it.

Therefore when Professor Hill says at the outset that his purpose is not to learn science, but to use science to teach about God, salvation and the eternity of the soul, he attempting gross malfeasance, first by identifying a wrong cause of atheism (it is not caused by heliocentrism) and second by identifying a wrong method of Biblical exegesis (expecting science to match tin-eared literalism of those heretics who worship the Bible, not Christ.)

So the introduction gave me the intellectual measure  of the man: the question he approaches are above his mental pay grade.

(more commentary at link below)
http://www.scifiwright.com/2016/09/the-most-difficult-fifty-bucks-i-ever-earned/

BADecker and logic never goes together

Who or what were the vegetables for in pre-sin times?

Most monkeys are omnivores. They love eating ripe fruits and seeds, but they also eat vegetables. Besides bark and leaves, they eat honey and flowers as well. The howler monkey is known as the loudest land animal. You can hear their loud calls even when you are 3 miles away from them in jungles. They are strictly vegetarians and enjoy eating small, young, tender leaves by hanging upside down from their tails. Their diet consists of fresh fruits like yams, bananas, grapes, and green vegetables. Various plants in the canopy layer of the rainforests act as cups and store water for them. Facts about monkeys inform us that they use their lips and hands skillfully to eat only those parts of vegetation which they want. All monkeys wander in search of food during the day,

I would agree. Too strong of a statement. We can't even kill all the plants and animals off.

The more I think about it, the more I see that God created everything tame and domesticated, under the complete control of mankind. Then sin came, and many (most?) things turned wild. As usual, science has it backward.

What is wrong with finding examples of domestication and asking questions about these traits?

I don't really get why anyone gives a shit. They're all rehearsed up front and this is common knowledge. I suppose we can count on Donny to chuck a spanner in the works for a lark.

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

...
What if EVERYTHING were domesticated back in prehistory, and there were no "aliens" or whatever to improve things. What if the closest to this were only demons that caused complex domesticated things to become wild.