You don't know your history... the 10-commandments are based on previous works, such as the code of Hammurabi

Civilized society existed before christianity was invented

There is nothing new in the bible in regards to morality... it was all written down before the bible

...

Priests are not even afraid to rape little boys... nobody is afraid of god

Similarly, part of what is so interesting about The Code of Hammurabi is how it compares (and contrasts) to the law of Moses.  Consider some areas of similarity:

• Justice.  Given that the image of God is in all men, and given that the law of God is inscribed on the hearts of men, it comes as no surprise that some of the laws in The Code are just.
• Civil order.  If a people would apply The Codes of Hammurabi and Moses, each offers  a recipe for civil order.
• The Lex Talionis, or “the principle that a person who has injured another person is similarly injured in retribution” (hat tip to Wikipedia for the helpful, concise definition.)  There’s lots of eye-for-an-eye type language in The Code, which also pops up in Moses, too.

And to be fair, there are more similarities than these.  But of far more striking significance are the differences:

• Sanctity of human life.  The Code of Hammurabi represents a lower view of human life than Moses.  For instance, in The Code of Hammurabi, the consequence for theft is to repay ten- to thirty-fold. If that’s not possible, the thief is executed.  That’s never the case in Moses.
• Favoring the privileged vs. protecting the oppressed.  Protection of the oppressed is near to God’s heart; not so much with Hammurabi.  Many of Hammurabi’s laws favor the free and wealthy.
• Justice.  Though some of The Code of Hammurabi is just, much of it is eminently unjust.  There is no injustice at all in the law of Moses.
• Mercy.  The notion of mercy is exceedingly rare in Hammurabi, but appears with regularity in Moses.
• The focus of the laws.  The vast majority of The Code of Hammurabi concerns money, property, and business transactions.  While these are addressed in Moses, the focus on moral laws, loving and honoring God and taking care of man’s relationship to God are strong emphases in Moses.

These are but a few of the differences that pose real problems for those who try to argue that Moses borrowed from Hammurabi.  The two codes (i.e., of Hammurabi and of Moses) come from different starting points and points of authority.

First you have to stop listening to BADlogic and his propaganda squad...

There is no "cult of atheism"

Atheism is not a religion, it is a lack of religion... it is a non-belief... there is no holy text, no gods, no dogma, no anything

There is almost zero organization to atheism... and that is only to battle religious crap like putting up 10-commandment statues and teaching religion in school, etc

It's like saying that people who don't believe in Santa Claus are in a cult and trying to ruin the world for everyone who does believe in Santa... it's just silly and stupid...

Where do people come up with this shit?

Is it simply projecting?  Because they are in a cult, they assume everyone is in a cult?

There are and have been a number of atheist cults and atheist groups which have had a cultish following. Some of these cults/groups still exist today. In 2015, FtBCon which is an online conference organized by the Freethought Blogs network, recognized that nonreligious/secular cults exist (for example, the atheist cult of objectivism).[1][2]

The atheist cults or atheist groups which have had a cultish following which have formed in history or exist today are often a result of factors such as: utopian thinking, fanatical devolution to various atheistic ideologies, a poor understanding of science/technology (or a penchant for materialist pseudoscientific thinking) and wishful thinking.

Also, although some of the groups listed below, which were founded by atheists/non-religious individuals are not entirely made up of atheists, they do have sizable atheist populations within them.

Contents  
1 Cult of Reason
2 Creativity Movement
3 Jim Jones
4 Raelism
5 Cults of personality following atheistic communist leaders
6 Objectivism has a cult like following
7 Fervent, atheist evolutionists
8 Cultish following of Richard Dawkins
9 Scientology
10 Scientism and origins of secular humanism
11 Nihilism
12 Freudian psychoanalysis devotees
13 LaVeyan Satanism
14 Atheists and the cryonics movement
15 Tranhumanism movement which seeks posthumanism and immortality through technology
16 Cults, social outcasts and atheism
17 Atheism and state indoctrination
18 Atheist cults and atheist denialism
19 See also
20 External links
21 References

Besides the fact that our moral system has nothing to do with Christianity

People always point to the 10-commandments... as if they are laws or something...
1) Thou shalt have no other gods before me (not a law)
2) Thou shalt not make idols (not a law)
3) Thou shalt not take gods name in vain (not a law)
4) Honor thy father and mother (not a law)
5) Keep the sabbath holy (not a law)
6) Thou shalt not kill (finally, one that is a law, though it was a law long before Christianity... Christians did not invent "do not murder")
7) Thou shalt not commit adultery (not a law)
8} Thou shalt not steal (another law that was invented before Christianity)
9) Thou shalt not covet (not a law)
10) Thou shalt not covet (again, not a law... don't know why god has to repeat himself either)

2 out of 10 does not form the basis of modern morality... especially considering both of the commandments which happen to be laws, were already laws before the bible was even written
...

@Coincube

Re increased violent and sex crime:

Swedish Christian nationalist would say the cause is mass immigration from sub sahara and middle east muslims.

Re china:

Official numbers are like <3% of the population. (From 1949 until now)
Important is that chinese christianity is just another tool for the chinese communist party to control the population.
The CPC is even appointing the Archbishop for china.

The best example that there exist no western christianity or religious freedom is falung gong.
In 6-7 years they managed to grow to 70 million believers and now the CPC is farming their organs.

The Chinese Government has banned members of the country’s ruling Communist Party from holding any religious beliefs.

An article written by the Wang Zuaon Director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs revealed that all Party members must abandon religion for Marxist atheism or be punished.

It also stated that religious groups should be ‘guided’ by the state in altering their doctrine in order to promote “socialist core values”.

Undermine
Over 88 million people are members of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and many apply to join the Party in order to enjoy better career prospects.

The CPC believes that foreigners have used Christianity and Islam to deliberately spread their political views in China and so undermine the Party, leading Wang Zuaon to introduce the permanent regulations.

He wrote: “Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a red line for all members”.

Punishment
“Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey Party rules and stick to the Party’s faith… they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion”, he added.

Wang also wrote that Party officials who have a religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resisted would be punished by the CPC.

Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Committee responded to Wang’s regulations by referring to Christianity as part of “China’s religious problem”.

Exponential growth
Christianity in China has been accused of being a national security risk, and in the past few years, hundreds of Christian pastors and activists have been arrested.

The international freedom watchdog Freedom House said in March that as many as 100 million people in China are facing “high” or “very high” levels of persecution under Communist rule.

However while religious freedom is under threat, Christianity has been growing exponentially in China.

Academics predict that by 2030 China will have more than 247 million Christians, which would be more than 17 per cent of the projected population.

Something weird is going on with human sperm production. For decades, scientists have warned that sperm counts are dropping among Western men, but no one has really been able to prove it. In what is now the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind, scientists have presented compelling evidence in support of this rather alarming assertion, showing that sperm counts have dropped more than 50 percent in just four decades.

The sperm count decline is real and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down, according to new research published in Human Reproduction Update. By conducting a meta-analysis of 185 studies published between 1973 and 2011, researchers from the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai documented a 52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration, and a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm count among men living in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
...
Scientists don’t actually know what’s causing the sperm count crisis.

Right now, the largest number of atheists in the world live in China. And for sure, the living conditions there are much better than that in religious nations such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Pakistan.

The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America

It is said to be China's biggest church and on Easter Sunday thousands of worshippers will flock to this Asian mega-temple to pledge their allegiance – not to the Communist Party, but to the Cross.

The 5,000-capacity Liushi church, which boasts more than twice as many seats as Westminster Abbey and a 206ft crucifix that can be seen for miles around, opened last year with one theologian declaring it a "miracle that such a small town was able to build such a grand church".

The £8 million building is also one of the most visible symbols of Communist China's breakneck conversion as it evolves into one of the largest Christian congregations on earth.

"It is a wonderful thing to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It gives us great confidence," beamed Jin Hongxin, a 40-year-old visitor who was admiring the golden cross above Liushi's altar in the lead up to Holy Week.

"If everyone in China believed in Jesus then we would have no more need for police stations. There would be no more bad people and therefore no more crime," she added.

Officially, the People's Republic of China is an atheist country but that is changing fast as many of its 1.3 billion citizens seek meaning and spiritual comfort that neither communism nor capitalism seem to have supplied.

Christian congregations in particular have skyrocketed since churches began reopening when Chairman Mao's death in 1976 signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Less than four decades later, some believe China is now poised to become not just the world's number one economy but also its most numerous Christian nation.

"By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon," said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.

"It is going to be less than a generation. Not many people are prepared for this dramatic change."

China's Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline.

By 2030, China's total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.

"Mao thought he could eliminate religion. He thought he had accomplished this," Prof Yang said. "It's ironic – they didn't. They actually failed completely."
Like many Chinese churches, the church in the town of Liushi, 200 miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, has had a turbulent history.

It was founded in 1886 after William Edward Soothill, a Yorkshire-born missionary and future Oxford University professor, began evangelising local communities.

But by the late 1950s, as the region was engulfed by Mao's violent anti-Christian campaigns, it was forced to close.

Liushi remained shut throughout the decade of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, as places of worship were destroyed across the country.
Since it reopened in 1978 its congregation has gone from strength to strength as part of China's officially sanctioned Christian church – along with thousands of others that have accepted Communist Party oversight in return for being allowed to worship.

Today it has 2,600 regular churchgoers and holds up to 70 baptisms each year, according to Shi Xiaoli, its 27-year-old preacher. The parish's revival reached a crescendo last year with the opening of its new 1,500ft mega-church, reputedly the biggest in mainland China.

"Our old church was small and hard to find," said Ms Shi. "There wasn't room in the old building for all the followers, especially at Christmas and at Easter. The new one is big and eye-catching."

The Liushi church is not alone. From Yunnan province in China's balmy southwest to Liaoning in its industrial northeast, congregations are booming and more Chinese are thought to attend Sunday services each week than do Christians across the whole of Europe.

A recent study found that online searches for the words "Christian Congregation" and "Jesus" far outnumbered those for "The Communist Party" and "Xi Jinping", China's president.

Atheism is depressing only because you'd believe that you're practically on your own in this world. Whether that would be actually depressing would depend on the persons temperament though. Some might sulk while some might see it as a challenge to take full control and responsibility for their lives.


Much of this was after they let in all those "immigrants". Their problem was that living in peace and happiness for a long time has somehow made them a bit more trusting. Rather mean comparison but it's like the dodos. They never had any predators so when humans came in, they'd even just walk towards people expecting no harm.

As for the suicide rates, imagine going to an amusement park, on your own, after a really bad break up. All the happiness around you just amplify the sadness inside. If everyone's happy but you are not, you start to think that the problem is you.

The literal insanity of mainstream public discourse, and the lack of insight of this fact, suggests that Man without religion is non-viable.

To put matters another way - religion is the most important thing in the human world.  

Of course, a few individuals, in the short term, can survive atheism mentally intact; but there is no evidence at all that this is a possibility for human societies over more than a few decades - then the signs of insanity (incoherence, exitinction) become more-and-more obvious... or they would do so if loss of insight was not itself a prime sign of insanity.

So insanity shields us from knowledge of our own insanity, because insanity destroys insight as much as it destroys judgement - it affects the whole mode of thinking.

How, then, do we know we, as a society, are insane?

1. By applying older judgements, from the time before Men became insane - reading old books, talking to non-modern people...

2. By looking at the basic biological viability of atheist societies in terms of reproduction, demographics, response to direct and immediate threats, scale of priorities ... Compare societies and groups that are biologically viable, with the modern atheist societies that are not...

3. By reflecting on how we feel about Life. Insane people are almost always miserable - dysphoric, despairing, desperate... almost all of the time. Even the euphoric frenzy of mania is brittle, and crashes into suicidal self-destruction with a high frequency. Is there hope?

In conclusion - religion is the most important thing.

Religion is necessary for long term motivation, for social coherence, for purpose, and to enable the individual to be a part of the whole.

Since religion is necessary, if or when humans either dispense with religion or else place it anything lower than first in priority; then they as individuals and their societies will begin to fall apart and spiral towards alienation, purposelessness, inability to perceive or reason what is important, cowardice (i.e. short-term selfishness), desperation and all the rest of it.

Modernity is the experiment of Man living without Religion. The experiment has been running for several generations.

But the experiment of modernity has deprived modern people of the motivation, honesty and ability to evaluate the results of the experiment - by the always changing criteria of modernity, modernity sees no alternative to itself...

Conclusion: Religion is objectively necessary; and, by one kind of reasoning, therefore true. If you are not religious you are living in error. If you are not religious then you need to become religious. The question you must settle is not whether you should be religious, but which religion you will adopt.

Unless you got some proof I do not see how can you blame that on atheism, that is happening all over the globe not only in countries where atheism is the strongest.

Religion and Progress

The greatest obstacle to human progress is not a technological hurdle but the evil inherent in ourselves. Humans have knowledge of good and evil and with this knowledge we often choose evil.

Collectivism exists because it employs aggregated force to limit evil especially the forms of evil linked to physical violence. Collectivism is expensive and inefficient but these inefficiencies are less than the cost of unrestrained individualism. Collectivism aggregates capital for the common good and we are far from outgrowing our need for this.

1.   Prehistory required the aggregation of human capital in the form of young warriors willing to fight to protect the tribe.
2.   The Agricultural Age required physical capital in the form of land ownership and a State to protect the land.
3.   The Industrial Age required the aggregation of monetary capital to fund large fixed capital investments and factories.

A farmer in the agricultural age could achieve some protection from theft and violence by arming himself. He could protect himself against a small hostile groups by forming defensive pacts with neighboring farmers. To defend against large scale organized violence, however, requires an army and thus a state.

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued for the merits of centralized monarchy. He believed that only absolute monarchy was capable of suppressing the evils of an unrestrained humanity. He described in graphic wording the consequences of a world without monarchy a condition he called the state of nature.


There may well have been a time in human history when the absolute monarchy of Hobbes was the best available government but Hobbes was writing at the end of that era. England had been transformed from a nation almost completely conquered by the Odin worshiping Great Heathen Army of 865 to a country that protected the legal rights of nobles in the Magna Carta of 1215 to a devoutly Christian nation that formalized the rights of judicial review for common citizens in the 1679 Habeas Corpus act. Hobbes had failed to appreciate the growth of moral capital that allowed for superior forms of government with increased freedom.

Our forefathers understood that it is morality and virtue that allows for freedom a lesson many today have forgotten.


In human interactions we often face a choice between cooperation (reaching a mutually beneficial exchange) and defection (advancement of ourselves to the detriment of our fellow man). The nation state, police, and laws suppress physical violence but do nothing to maintain the morality and virtue that sustain freedom. Collectivism limits some avenues of defection while opening entire new possibilities. New opportunities for defection arise along the entire economic spectrum. Everything from special interest lobbying, to disability scammers, and on a larger scale our entire fiat monetary system are essentially forms of defection allowing the few to profit at the expense of the many. Nation state collectivism has allowed for the creation of great civilizations and yet is entirely unsustainable in its current form.


The perishing of Western civilization, however, does not mean fragmentation and collapse. Indeed in this instance the opposite appears to be true and collapse looks set to drive us via economic fundamentals and debt into a single world government paradigm for reasons discussed at length elsewhere.

The evolution of the social contract is a progressive climb to higher potential energy systems with increased degrees of freedom. The state of nature begat tribalism. Tribalism grew into despotism. Despotism advanced into monarchy. Monarchies were replaced by republics. It is likely that in the near future republics will be consumed by world government, and perhaps someday world government will evolve into decentralized government.

Each iteration has a common theme for each advance increases the number of individuals able to engage in cooperative activity while lowering the number of individuals able to defect. Each iteration increases the sustainable degrees of freedom the system can support. Moral capital is the foundation that allows this progress to occur. For this reason ethical monotheism is the single greatest contributor to human progress from any source since human culture emerged from the stone ages.


The utopia of limited to no government would only be possible for a population constantly striving at all times to be moral. Such a utopia would require all individuals to always act cooperatively, honesty, and transparently. We lack the required moral fiber for anything like this to work at our current juncture in history.

See: Freedom and God for more.

The exact opposite is true...

Atheist countries have the least crime, and the happiest people

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, etc... predominantly atheist countries top this list, and all the countries at the bottom are highly religious

Almost eight out of ten Swedes are either "not religious" or "convinced atheists", according to a new global study that concludes the Nordic nation is the least religious in the West.

Sweden’s official statistics do show increases in “lethal violence” (which includes murder, manslaughter and other deadly assaults) and sexual offenses  over the past ten years. Between 2006 and 2015 the incidence of “lethal violence” does fluctuate, but there is a sharp 65 percent spike from 2012 to 2015. In the same period, there was also an almost 49 percent increase in sexual offenses (a category including, among other offenses, rape). Looking at rape by itself, from 2006-2015 there was a 40 percent increase in the number of reported rapes.

The numbers of young Swedes reporting that they suffer from depression, anxiety or other mental health disorders has risen in the last 30 years. That increase has in turn led to a significant rise in prescriptions of antidepressants. In fact, according to the Swedish health authorities, antidepressant prescriptions increased by 36 percent between 2006 and 2012.

To those who haven’t heard, Sweden is the butt of just about every joke on the internet. Swedish men are mocked for their effeminacy and the country’s “tolerant” attitude towards migrants astounds many people. It is hard to believe some of the news stories about rapings, gropings and cultural marxist insanity that come out of Sweden on a weekly basis.

I assumed much of this was hyperbole, but I was so painfully, agonizingly, and completely DEAD WRONG.

Are Swedes no longer as happy as they used to be? According to a new report Sweden has dropped to the world's 10th happiest country, down from fifth place three years ago.

Present day conditions are well nigh ideal for spiritual destruction. We have a comfortable material existence and a superficially plausible explanation for why life exists, plausible enough to satisfy those who aren't willing to look more deeply anyway, coupled with a technology that gives us an abundance of toys to distract us from our inner emptiness.

Furthermore the sexual revolution has led to a spiritual desensitivity which would have shocked our ancestors, the wisest of whom knew that releasing the sexual energy from a proper constraint (constraint not repression) is profoundly destructive on many levels, both spiritual and material. The wisest knew and the rest more or less followed, certainly in terms of how society and culture were ordered which is the important thing. Laws will always be broken but without law there is chaos, and that's what we have today if you observe from the vantage point of the spiritual plane...

Yes, people, especially the young, live and are growing up during a period of terrible corruption. I was told in the 1990s that we were living at a time of the greatest vulgarity in the history of the planet. Vulgarity was the word used but, in the manner used, it implied a lot more than just simple coarseness. It meant decadence, corruption and spiritual ignorance. It meant declining taste, lack of dignity and ugliness. Now, of course, things are significantly worse. So people, in particular young people with a debased culture, both popular and intellectual, are subject to appalling influences and temptations. But still the way out exists for those who will pay attention to the voice of truth within them. Outer institutions are useless so the way out is actually the way in but ultimately that's what it's always been, even when institutions helped rather than hindered the spiritual quest as used to be the case.

So we may be living in a time of spiritual darkness and deprivation but that is the test. Will we allow ourselves to fall into line with that because of a willful (and the will is always involved) lack of response to truth or will we listen to God's voice within? Will we follow the herd and the line of least resistance or will we acknowledge conscience and hearken to the intuition? We have the choice and if the choice is hard that is only because it must be to be a true test of our mettle, our spiritual quality and our good will. I believe that now we have, as probably never before, not on the same scale anyway, a sorting out of the sheep from the goats or, if you like, of the good seed from the bad. Today there is a real sifting of souls.

False ideas that modify behaviour may also happen to impact health outcomes.

The placebo effect for example, is very real.

The suicide rate among teen girls reached a 40-year high in 2015, according to new analysis from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers found a substantial increase in suicides among teen girls and boys in the U.S. from 1975 to 2015, with the rate among girls hitting a record high. From 2007 to 2015 alone, suicide rates doubled among teen girls and by more than 30 percent among teen boys.

While the suicide rate fell in 2007—3.7 to 2.4 per 100,000 girls and 18.1 to 10.8 per 100,000 boys—it spiked again in 2015 to 5.1 per 100,000 girls and 14.2 per 100,000 boys. To put it another way: In 2015, 5 girls per 100,000 committed suicide compared to 14 boys.

Overall, this analysis speaks to a rising national trend, CDC suicide expert Thomas Simon told CNN.
"We know that overall in the U.S., we're seeing increases in suicide rates across all age groups," he said, adding that the pattern is "pretty robust."

Against a grim backdrop of rising suicide rates among American women, new research has revealed a blinding shaft of light: One group of women — practicing Catholics — appears to have bucked the national trend toward despair and self-harm.

Compared with women who never participated in religious services, women who attended any religious service once a week or more were five times less likely to commit suicide between 1996 and 2010, says a study published Wednesday by JAMA Psychiatry.

It’s not clear how widely the findings can be applied to a diverse population of American women. In a study population made up of nurses and dominated by women who identified themselves as either Catholic or Protestant, the suicide rate observed was about half that for U.S. women as a whole. Of 89,708 participants aged 30 to 55, 36 committed suicide at some point over 15 years...

The suicide-prevention effect of religion was clearly not a simple matter of group identity: Self-identified Catholics who never attended mass committed suicide nearly as often as did women of any religion who were not active worshipers.

Instead, the authors suggested that attendance at religious services is “a form of meaningful social participation” that buffers women against loneliness and isolation — both factors that are strongly implicated in depression and suicide. “Religion and spirituality may be an underappreciated resource that psychiatrists and clinicians could explore with their patients, as appropriate,” wrote a team of researchers led by Tyler J. VanderWeele of Harvard’s  T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

With no belief in higher meaning, too many young people turn to hook-up sex, drugs, and social media for fulfillment.

Our teenagers and often those still younger are taking their lives in increasing numbers, many seemingly without warning. Many more young people are suffering from depression, anxiety, or related mental-health problems. The reports often link to social media: bullying leading to suicide; serious self-harm in an attempt to deal with emotional pain; suicide pacts; a widely cited post giving reasons for suicide by a child who killed herself; drug abuse and other destructive behaviors; school shootings that often end in suicide.

Other evidence of youthful mental-health problems: Pre-adult suicides are up three to five times (depending on the source) since the 1950s and still increasing. One study reported that 10 percent of the young are taking anti-depressants. In “Teen Depression and Anxiety: Why the Kids Are Not Alright,” Susanna Schrobsdorff  of Time magazine noted that “adolescents today have a reputation for being fragile, less resilient, and more overwhelmed than their parents growing up.” We are also seeing an increase in mental-health issues in college-age students. The average well-being of entering college students has been in decline since the 1970s, when the measuring began. During college years, mental-health problems are on the rise, according to recent studies.

Yet American society today is far better off economically than it was 50 years ago, and we have a better understanding of mental-health problems. Moreover, we now have a great many more psychiatrists, psychotherapists, counselors, and mental-health practitioners than we did even a generation ago. So what’s wrong — what has happened?

Schrobsdorff proposed that the cause for the decline is the social climate that teenagers experience. She attributes this climate to social media, smart phones, and school pressures. These factors are recent, though, and did not emerge until well after the observed decline of adolescent mental health.

A far stronger case can be made for our society’s decline in religious faith as the cause of these mental pathologies in the young. The decline in religion that began in the ’60s has accelerated in the past 15 years and is especially great among young people. A recent Pew report noted that over a third of its young respondents described themselves as “believers in nothing in particular.” Schrobsdorff’s omission of religious decline is one indication of how great the decline in religion has been — and how much our secular culture is in denial on the issue. The media just doesn’t “get” religion.

‌
In America, the transcendent dimension of life has historically been expressed primarily through the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose decline in recent years has created an enormous vacuum in meaning. This vacuum has been “filled” by postmodern nihilism combined with the “deconstruction” — aggressively taught in the academy — of belief in objective truth, goodness, and beauty. Moral relativism now eclipses transcendent meaning. The fragility of many young people — often termed “snowflakes” — shows their emotional vulnerability. They interpret ideas that challenge them as unbearable acts of aggression, and they use harsh and even violent measures to silence disagreeable opponents. In short, the prevalence of political correctness is a clear sign that belief in higher meaning and rational discussion has ceased to function in much of our higher-education system. Furthermore, political correctness is itself a symptom of the unstable mental condition of those who insist on it.

Countless young people now live in a world without any real meaning; they feel there is nothing for them to believe in. Emotional numbness is one of the consequences. They no longer value themselves for their inherent worth and dignity as created by God; they no longer find self-worth in their efforts to lead lives based on truth and love. Instead, many of our young people look outside themselves for validation — to material goods and social feedback. But many find these superficial, transitory, and empty. In addition, the decline of religion has resulted in sexual relations becoming trivialized and deprived of any greater meaning. The “hook-up” culture leaves many wounded young people in its wake.

While the secular class and those victimized by their policies have been shedding their religious beliefs, evidence for the positive effects of religious life have been repeatedly reported by many studies over the past decades. Many of them show that strongly religious people are happier, healthier, and live longer than those with no religious belief and practice. Having faith in God and attributing a religious meaning to life anchors people, directs their efforts to things beyond the material world, protects them against setbacks, and provides supportive community.

What might be done to imrpovee mental health via religious practice? To begin, this is not a problem for government policy. The government just needs to get out of the way — and be less hostile to religion. Recent Supreme Court decisions dealing with religious issues suggest that this will happen.

Individuals can respond in many ways. Fathers and mothers can encourage their children in religious practice centered in family life and encourage them to join serious religious peer groups. Relatives — grandparents, aunts, and uncles — can give valuable advice. For young people drawn to atheism, many recent books address the topic brilliantly (see Alister McGrath’s Twilight of Atheism,for instance). Darwinism, materialism, and atheism have received powerful recent critiques (as in Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Stephen Meyer’sDarwin’s Doubt, and Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God).

Religious and private schools can make a tremendous difference in their student communities by regularly emphasizing the importance of God and promoting faith.

Business leaders and others in the professions can speak out about their faith in public settings and implement new ideas about how to reach the young.

There have been times in America’s past when religion was in decline and seemed on the way out — especially according to its intellectual detractors. But at these moments, Biblical religion recovered with new movements and energies. We propose that we are now at the threshold of another such renewal. Let us pray so, since our secular culture offers no credible reasons to believe in higher meaning. It offers only empty materialist distractions on a slow march to societal suicide. The plight of our young sounds a wake-up call we can no longer ignore.

— Paul Vitz is a senior scholar at Divine Mercy University and a professor emeritus of psychology at New York University. Bruce Buff is a management consultant and the author of the scientific-spiritual thriller The Soul of the Matter.

The number of Russians who identify as atheists has fallen by 50 percent in just three years, according to a recent poll by the Levada research center.
The poll, which was conducted in late June, revealed that the number of Russian atheists, or those who consider themselves “absolutely irreligious,” fell sharply from 26 percent in 2014 to just 13 percent in 2017.

Religious believers now make up 86 percent of the population, the survey found, with 44 percent describing themselves as “quite religious,” 33 percent as “not too religious” and 9 percent as “very religious.”

Levada, a non-governmental Russian research center, conducted the survey on a representative all-Russian sample of urban and rural population among 1,600 people aged 18 and over in 137 settlements in 48 regions of the country.

Unsurprisingly, the poll found that Orthodoxy remains the dominant and most popular religion in Russia, and more than 92 percent of respondents view the Orthodox church with “respect and benevolence.” Regarding Catholics, 74 percent of Russians views the Catholic church with “respect and benevolence,” while 10 percent have “conflicted feelings” toward Catholics and another 5 percent look on them with “dislike” or “fear.”

Fifty-nine percent of respondents hold a favorable view of Islam, while 17 percent have “conflicted feelings” toward them and 13 percent look on Muslims with “dislike” or “fear.”

The poll furthermore seems to indicate that anti-Semitic sentiment is falling in Russia, as the number of those who say they either “dislike” or “fear” Jews has dropped significantly, from 15 percent in 2014 to 11 percent today.

A Stanford University professor has been teaching for years that religion is a form of mental illness, according to a Tuesday report from The Independent highlighting the lessons.

Professor and neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky teaches Stanford students that religion in all of its forms, regardless of benefits, is an irrationality and a kind of “organized schizophrenia,” and has made these claims since at least 2009.
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Sapolsky admitted that religion had observable health benefits, despite his belief that it is an expression of mental illness.

“One of the healthiest things you could do with your life is to be religious,” Sapolsky said in a video. “And to be highly religious, it is a very strong protector against major depression. Religious belief extends your life expectancy, and that’s after you control for – it changes risk factors, you’re less likely to drink to excess, all of that.

This animated map charts the course of Christianity's growth around the world, from the Apostles' time to our own.

This animated cartography, courtesy of the Western Conservatory, is a striking graphic representation of one of the most important movements in the history of mankind: the spread of Christianity.

The animated map not only shows, in chronological order, the nations that adopted Christianity as a national religion, or regions in which Christianity became statistically the religion with the greatest number of adherents, but also the places where enough historical and archaeological evidence was gathered as to affirm that, at some point, there was indeed a Christian presence in the area. That is, the map includes the first journeys of the apostles and the outward-reaching margins of the early Church.

The problem is, that god can do something about it, he can do anything, can't he? If I know that my house will get burned tomorrow and I can prevent it then I will just prevent it, it makes no sense to not do anything about it knowing it's going to happen and then get angry, why would I be angry? It makes no sense as I said. God makes no sense.

If I knew my kids will mess up their lives and I can do something to help them then I will just do something to help them, considering god can do anything then again makes no sense.

To understand the meaning and purpose of suffering, we must first go back to the very purpose of the Creation and the meaning of our life in this world.

God's purpose in creation was to bestow of His good to another. Since God desired to bestow good, a partial good would not be sufficient. The good that He bestows would have to be the ultimate good that His handiwork could accept. True good exists only in God. His wisdom therefore decreed that the nature of this true benefaction be His giving created things the opportunity to attach themselves to Him to the greatest degree possible for them.

God's wisdom, however, decreed that for such good to be perfect, the one enjoying it must be its master. He must be one who has earned it for himself, and not one associated with it accidentally and without reason.

God therefore arranged and decreed the creation of concepts of both perfection and deficiency, as well as a creature with equal access to both namely, Man. This creature would then be given the means to earn perfection and avoid deficiency.

Man must earn this perfection, however, through his own free will and desire. If he were compelled to choose perfection, then he would not actually be its master, and God's purpose would not be fulfilled. It was therefore necessary that man be created with free will.

Man's inclinations are therefore balanced between good and evil, and he is not compelled toward either of them. He has the power of choice, and is able to choose either side, knowingly and willingly, as well as to possess whichever one he wishes. Man was therefore created with both a Good Urge and an Evil Urge. He has the power to incline himself in whichever direction he desires.