Could the very high rate of mental illness in Europe be related to religion decline?

[Resume]

Martin Luther died a baptized Jesus lover....so he will NEVER pay for his sins.

Have you forgotten your Christian Salvation and Atonement principles?

Have you forgotten Paul in Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans?

Have you forgotten Mark 16:16?

In fact according to the Christian Theology the Jews who were massacred by the Christians will roast in Hell and the ones who extirpated them will have the Eternal Heavenly Servitude in heaven.

In the end it's not good works but to whom you swore allegiance, to whom you gave a loyalty oath. One reason why this superstition is such a pestilence.

 

[Resume]

Not according to Jesus who said not everyone who says Lord, Lord, with enter the kingdom of heaven.

He also talked of those who had Him on their lips but not in their hearts.

How do you know what he had in his heart? You omniscient too?

 

[Akhenaten]

So then I assume you believe the sin of the Holocaust did not increase the amount of strokes or physical ailments among the millions of Jews who experienced it.

What???

 

[X]

I maintain your statement makes no sense.

Yes. You might want to think about that...

 

[Leumas]

But it wouldn't be considered a crime in Nazi Germany. So whether or not the Holocaust is wrong is relative without a higher authority like God to say it is wrong. So from an atheist perspective if Germany won the war the Holocaust would not have been a crime, since Nazi Germany courts would obviously not have ruled it a crime.

It would be a crime in the eyes of the Jews and any person who has empathy and sympathy and decency and humanity.

There would be no need for a God.....but REGARDLESS it would not be YOUR GOD assuming you are talking about Jesus/YHWH/Allah..... for he is not a magnanimous nor forgiving god. For him genocide and holocausts are standard fair.

For God of the bible exterminating people who do not believe as he wants them to believe is quite moral and is cause for GENOCIDE and HOLOCAUSTS of Biblical Proportions.

So if we were to go by your God's moral standards....what Hitler did was quite the right thing......so now the question remains.....where do you DOC get your moral standards from.....I hope not from the Bible.

John 8:

8:42 Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
8:43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
8:44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
8:45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.​

Deut 13

13:6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
13:7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;
13:8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: 13:9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. 13:10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.


13:13 Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known;

13:15 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.​

 

[Akhenaten]

Martin Luther will be accountable for sins just like everyone else.

Seems unlikely. He has teh dead, and that pretty much clears the ledger.

I know of no modern Christian denominations that wouldn't denounce these Luther's teachings.

And of course your personal knowledge is always the last word on these things.

Got any quotes from, say, some Lutherans to back up this assertion?

And all this is off topic. I simply used the Holocaust as an example of what people would consider as a sin, not to get deeply into the Holocaust.

• Introduce Holocaust in attempt to make point
  
  
• Fail to make point
  
  
• Declare Holocaust off-topic.
  
  
• 

 

[Leumas]

• Introduce Holocaust in attempt to make point
• Fail to make point
• Declare Holocaust off-topic.
• 

Quite right..... well noted.....standard fundamentalist chicanery if you ask me!

 

[TimCallahan]

(snip) . . . Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study. . . . (snip)

First of all, unless you can show that there are no stressors, economic, social or personal, then anxiety, insomnia and some forms of depression are not "brain disorders." Chronic depression, such as that treatable by Prozac and other antidepressants usually involves a chemical imbalance having to do with various neuro-transmitters. This may have some interaction with conscious behavior, but is mostly a chemical problem.

The problem with the study as presented in your link from the OP is that it does not separate out anxiety, depression and substance abuse from either schizophrenia or strokes and senile dementias. I've already responded to your assertion that strokes and dementias are possibly the result of sin. I consider the idea nonsense.

If you can show me a study comparing all regions of the developed world (Europe, U.S. and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan) or at very least a comparison between European nations and the U.S.; a study that compares rates of anxiety, depression, insomnia and substance abuse (including eating disorders), but not dementias and strokes; then we'd have something to discuss. Until then, your assertion that the decline in religion is the cause of Europe's high rate of mental disease is unsupported. This is particularly true due to the skewing to the study you cited, with its inclusion of strokes and dementias.

 

[catsmate]

So then I assume you believe the sin of the Holocaust did not increase the amount of strokes or physical ailments among the millions of Jews who experienced it.

Oh good grief.

 

[TimCallahan]

So then I assume you believe the sin of the Holocaust did not increase the amount of strokes or physical ailments among the millions of Jews who experienced it.

Thus, I assume you believe that having almost all of your possessions taken, being separated from your loved ones, being crammed into cattle cars for hundreds of miles, and being put in dirty camps guarded by armed soldiers did not increase the incidences of strokes or physical disorders among those people experiencing it.

Unless you can demonstrate that something akin to the Holocaust is going on in Europe today, then this post is irrelevant to the subject of this thread. What possible sin, prevalent in Europe at this time, could be causing strokes and senile dementia in the present day European population?

BTW, I have to second catsmate1's post.

 

[Elizabeth I]

So then I assume you believe the sin of the Holocaust did not increase the amount of strokes or physical ailments among the millions of Jews who experienced it.

You are so funny. It's quite likely that some Jews in the concentration camps died of strokes but there was no sin involved, just neglect and non-existent medical care.

And please note that I said that you are funny, not the Holocaust. I clarify only because you sometimes seem to have a reading comprehension problem.

 

[Sun Countess]

Not to most of the 82% of Americans and the 52% of Europeans who say they believe in God.

I would imagine the above people would say the Holocaust is a sin.

First, the number of people believing in something has no bearing on whether that something is imaginary or real. Hundreds of thousands of Scientologists believe that body thetans are real (and are responsible for people wanting to do bad things, similar to the Christian concept of sin): does that make them real?

Also, what does the Holocaust have to do with anything? That was a horrible evil. Your list of imaginary sins includes such things as mixing fibers, eating shellfish, fornicating, and thinking negative thoughts. The vast majority of sins are activities which cause no harm and have no victims.

It's considered a crime ... tried in court, not in church, by judges and lawyers, not pastors and elders.

This.

So then I assume you believe the sin of the Holocaust did not increase the amount of strokes or physical ailments among the millions of Jews who experienced it.

The evil of the holocaust increased the amount of death, disease, and suffering of its (primarily Jewish) victims. Were the Jews the ones who were sinning and needed to pay the price for these sins in your twisted philosophy? And why would you assume that other people aren't able to use consistent logic to draw conclusions?

Sin is a made-up concept, and none of the people who committed the "sins" of the Holocaust are paying for them through some sort of cosmic punishment system. None of the perpetrators was able to apologize to Jesus and get to Heaven, and none of the perpetrators is currently suffering through an eternity of hellfire. In case you're missing a step, I'm saying the heaven and hell are also completely imaginary concepts, and no matter how many people believe in them, they simply do not exist.

Not according to Jesus who said not everyone who says Lord, Lord, with enter the kingdom of heaven.

He also talked of those who had Him on their lips but not in their hearts.

And what did Jesus say about who makes the decisions about who gets to this imaginary heaven? I'm pretty sure it says something about not judging other people, and also not bearing false witness or taking God's name in vain. That means you're not allowed to say something that DOC wants to say, and pretending that you have God's weight behind it. I think it's a pretty stupid commandment myself, so don't feel bad on my account for breaking it so often.

 

[TimCallahan]

Tonight I e-mailed Dr. Hans-Ulrich Witchen, who headed up the study cited by DOC in the OP. I asked him if he had any breakdown of what percentage of the 38% of Europeans who suffered from mental illness were suffering from strokes and various dementias and what percentage suffered from anxiety, depression and substance abuse. Hopefully, he will respond to my e-mail and give me a substantive answer.

 

[Leif Roar]

The article in question can be found here, by the way.

 

[edge]

Edge,
Do you agree with DOC's argument that strokes are a result of sin?

Yes and no, because it's a gray area.
If a stroke is from a result of gluttony, then yes.

 

[laca]

Yes and no, because it's a gray area.

Pun intended?

If a stroke is from a result of gluttony, then yes.

So your rock-hard stance is that if a stroke (physical illness) is provably caused by something you label as sin, then it is caused by sin? Wow, how long did you think about that answer?

 

[Edward Palamar]

The bottom line in determining the ratio from the text of the Gospel can be seen easiest in this, of Christ's own words : "Worry not".

 

[edge]

Sin is a completely made-up concept. And please stop using weasly words, such as "maybe" and "if." Stand up for what you believe in. Say it straight out. I get that you take your cues from your imaginary god who never says things directly, but sends very confusing signals, such as earthquakes and mental illness statistics that include insomnia so that his followers can mangle them, especially when they try to insert causations into any dubious correlations.

DOC, are you ever worried that the worst sin of all is reading messages into random and natural events? Or maybe it's placing the blame for all the world's ills on other people believing and behaving in ways that you don't like. You seem to hate the Muslims for demonizing women, yet you demonize women, Muslims, atheists, and people who practice voodoo.



That's because it's easy to get believers to believe any ridiculous something as long as it fits into their worldview and doesn't inconvenience them too much. I don't see believers asking for their own rights to be stripped from them, or saying that earthquakes and mental illness are due to their own sinful lifestyles. Maybe if they stopped being so judgmental and got out of everybody else's business, we'd have fewer earthquakes and hurricanes.**



**Not that I believe this, but the believers should at least think about it if they didn't want to seem like raging hypocrites. Oh wait. I see where I made my mistake.

In yellow above:
Replace the word sin with bad life choices or lifestyle.

In answer to what's in bold:
Being an observer and trying to follow a good lifestyle is not being judgmental, it's learning from others bad choices, whether you follow biblical principalities that are in agreement with science or not or one or the other, right is right and wrong is wrong, there is no middle ground that is absolutely correct, there are causes and effects to some degree.

 

[joobz]

Yes and no, because it's a gray area.
If a stroke is from a result of gluttony, then yes.

In other words, there is no relationship between labeling something as "a sin" and it leading to strokes.
I fully agree.

 

[edge]

Pun intended?



So your rock-hard stance is that if a stroke (physical illness) is provably caused by something you label as sin, then it is caused by sin? Wow, how long did you think about that answer?

About two seconds, so why ask?