Topic: Health and Religion - page 20. (Read 210900 times)

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/zeus?s=t

I did yea because it doesn't say anything about that, the supreme deity of the ancient Greeks, a son of Cronus and Rhea, brother of Demeter, Hades, Hera, Hestia, and Poseidon, and father of a number of gods, demigods, and mortals; the god of the heavens, identified by the Romans with Jupiter. So now Zeus has to be real because it's in the dictionary, right?

Teens, especially girls, whose parents are religious may be less likely to die by suicide, no matter how they feel about religion themselves, new research suggests.

The lower suicide risk among those raised in a religious home is independent of other common risk factors, including whether parents suffered from depression, showed suicidal behavior or divorced, the Columbia University researchers said.
...
About 12 percent of American teens say they have had suicidal thoughts. And suicide is the leading cause of death among 15- to 19-year-old girls.

For the study, Priya Wickramaratne and colleagues examined data from a three-generation study at New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University. The data, spanning 30 years, included 214 children from 112 families.

Most belonged to Christian denominations and some families lived in areas with limited church choices. All were white.

Among teens who thought religion was important, researchers found a lower risk for suicide among girls but not boys. Researchers saw the same association with church attendance.

When parent and child views were weighed together, however, researchers found a lower risk for suicide among young people whose parents considered religion important.

Wickramaratne, an associate professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at Columbia University, said, "Our findings suggest that there may be alternative and additional ways to help children and adolescents at highest risk for suicidal behaviors."

She said those strategies include asking parents about their spiritual history when a child is brought in for psychiatric evaluation, and assessing the child's own religious beliefs and practices -- especially with girls.

December 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The responses to my column last week detailing the horrific story of a boy who engaged in porn-inspired sexual molestation of his young nieces after accessing porn on his iPhone have indicated once again that many parents simply do not want to recognize the dangers that smartphones pose to their children.

Over and over again, commenters made genuinely stupid and ill-thought-out assertions, such as “You must be a Luddite!” Obviously, one does not have to be opposed to technology to recognize the dangers of some devices. We all agree that children should not drive cars, because it is not safe. We are not anti-car just because we do not think everyone should be able to drive them at a young age.

Additionally, many people seemed unaware of the fact that pornography has mainstreamed sexual violence, and that the vast majority of young people access porn on their cell phones. These are unfortunate realities, and I could tell you hundreds of stories of children accessing porn on phones at incredibly young ages, often impacting their lives for years into the future.

I could provide you with 20, but for today, here are just 10 reasons you shouldn’t give your child a smartphone:

1. Many parents harbor the mistaken belief that once their children have a smartphone, they can still control their behavior. In reality, it is nearly impossible to completely lock down a device (although there are very important steps that can be taken), and 71 percent of teens hide their smartphone activity from their parents. I’ve had many parents tell me how relieved they are that their children haven’t ended up hooked on porn or involved in “that stuff,” knowing full well that their children have been involved.

2. As Vanity Fair journalist Nancy Jo Sales laid out in her devastating book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, sexting and sending nude selfies are now ubiquitous in every school from the big cities to the rural Bible belt. I interviewed a number of high school girls (from Christian schools) on this issue over the past several years, and every one of them said the same thing: The pressure to send photos is relentless. Giving your child a smartphone is providing the opportunity for that pressure to be applied. Many give in. Lives are ruined as a result. The photos are forever.

3. The average age a child first looks at porn is now age 11. (The youngest porn addict I ever met was homeschooled.) Providing children a device that, regardless of how hard you try to implement oversight or lock the device down (which is impossible to do completely), you are handing them a portal to the totality of human sexual depravity as it exists online. The majority of young people now view pornography, boys and girls. The majority of them have seen things (grotesque sexual violence among other things) that previous generations could not have imagined. To give them this opportunity and this temptation at an age when we would not trust them with the right to vote, drink, smoke, or drive makes no rational sense and is arguably more dangerous.

4. Most children are exposed to sexual violence via pornography via smartphones. As I mentioned in my previous columns, experts are increasingly noticing that children are trying what they see in porn on other children, with tens of thousands of cases in the U.K. of child-on-child sexual abuse being investigated, and healthcare professionals in the United States sounding the alarm.

5. Our society still has not figured out how to control these technologies. In fact, the very Silicon experts who create these devices and these screens warn that they are a “dark influence” on children and either do not provide their own children smartphones at all, or they strictly limit the amount of time they may be on one. If those who develop smartphones are saying that they are dangerous for young people, perhaps we should be listening more closely.

6. Porn companies are actively trying to get children to look at pornography. Some have tagged hardcore porn content with phrases like “Dora the Explorer,” for example, in order to get kids to stumble on to their material. Your child may not be looking for porn. Porn is certainly looking for your child.

7. The porn companies have quite literally re-digitized their content in order to make it more accessible on a smartphone. They know that the vast majority of young people will not be viewing their material on laptops or desktops or TVs anymore. Most young people are viewing porn on their smartphones, in their bedrooms. If parents have restricted Wi-fi, it is easy these days to find free Wi-fi almost anywhere. So while you may be convinced that your child/teen can withstand the relentless sexual temptation of having access to pornography, the porn companies are quite certain that they can win this fight.

8. Smartphones provide children the first environment in history that exists without any oversight by any adult whatsoever. The reason cyber-bullying is so effective and so dangerous is the fact that social media has created an alternative world, inhabited by young people and their peers and inaccessible to parents and guardians. A generation ago, the bullying would stop when you got home from school. Today, you can be bullied at home, in your bedroom. In fact, a spate of suicides resulting from cyber-bullying tell that precise story.

9. Children do not need smartphones. They think they do, of course, because they want access to social media and the Internet. Who wouldn’t want access to something that can answer any and all of their questions? But considering the tremendous power of this tool, it is incredibly naïve to think that children and young teens are mature enough to handle it when the impact of smartphones on adults (and the skyrocketing rates of tech addiction) indicates that we have not even been able to figure out how to use this technology responsibly. If they need a phone for calling and texting purposes, get them a device without Internet access.

10. Smartphones often eliminate a child’s interest in other, healthier activities – like reading, outdoor recreation, and family time. I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone who has given their child a smartphone that a smartphone rapidly becomes an enormous part of the child’s life. This, of course, was predictable: There is a reason they begged so hard to have one in the first place.

Of course it's fictional. The idea is that if we forgot everything we know right now and everything was destroyed, we would simply re discover all the science again, however all the science fiction books, religious books, etc etc would not appear again, at least not exactly the same.

Let me give you some very important facts. There are ancient, almost 2,000-year-old copies, or fragments of copies, of the New Testament, that show that there were at about 25,000 copies of the N.T. back then. Today there are billions of copies of the N.T.

If there had been no development of a printing press, or other print-making media, there would still be 25,000+ (and probably in excess of 100,000) hand copies of the N.T., but there would be only (at best) a handful of copies of any particular, scientific writing.

Even today, the Bible is probably the book that has been published the most... 5 or 6 billion copies.

So, why? If the Bible came only to, say, 1 billion, it might be in the range of other, major writings. But the fact that it is way ahead of other writings, shows that there is something compelling about the Bible.

The idea that in 1,000 years religion wouldn't come back is something that is irrelevant. Why? You aren't going to destroy the Bible no matter how you try. So, the whole question is fictional.



As for faith, you need it because you don't know what will happen in the next minute. You have faith in whatever... call it fate, or the design of the universe, or happenstance, or God... faith that things will go on as well in the future as they have in the past. And you hope that they will. So as Saint Paul says, "These three remain, faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Let me give you a really cool example that Ricky Gervais once told someone. If we take any book of fiction, or any holy book and destroyed it, that in 1000 years wouldn't come back as it was but if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed it, in 1000 years it would come back because all the same tests would be the same results. I don't need religion or faith and you don't either.

Let me give you a really cool example that Ricky Gervais once told someone. If we take any book of fiction, or any holy book and destroyed it, that in 1000 years wouldn't come back as it was but if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed it, in 1000 years it would come back because all the same tests would be the same results. I don't need religion or faith and you don't either.

We simply disagree about religion and science.

While there have certainly been conflicts between organized religion and science over the years the belief that religion is fundamentally in conflict with science is untrue.

Over the long run scientific progress ultimately depends on a culture that both acknowledges the existence of truth and sustaines a value structure that treasures it.

Progress also requires a social structure that promotes cooperation over exploration enabling discovered truth to be harnessed for good. The foundation that facilitates these things in a human society is the shared first principles of said society.

For the west that foundation is a belief in God though this is not widely understood or acknowledged. Reject God and you gut both the basis for a belief in non subjective truth as well as the framework that promotes cooperation over exploitation.

you don't need religion to be morally good.

I'm sure they are happy, however humanity wouldn't have advanced if it wasn't for science. Not to say that there aren't scientists who believe in god, there are, quite a lot but certainly way less than the average population. Religion individually can be good because you think god will always help you and even if you die, you go to heaven, so it's a win/win. However as a society, religion isn't good, you don't need religion to be morally good. We wouldn't go to mars if everyone was religious because why would we? Why would we do anything at all, who cares, we are all going to heaven.

Yes well I think we agree to disagree on whether the existence of God is truth or not.
That was not the focus of this particular study just the health effects of such a belief on one's children.

There have been posters in this thread who have argued that teaching of Christianity or Judiasm to ones children is child abuse.

The data in this study shows that children raised in a religious environment are (on average) happier into adulthood less likely to do drugs, report more life satisfaction, are less likely to have sex at an early age, and less likely to have a sexually transmitted infection.

I enrolled my children in a private Christian school this year Seventh Day Adventists. So far I am happy with this choice.

Lying to kids about certain things can be good, however it doesn't mean it's true.

A new study from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health finds that kids and teens who are raised with religious or spiritual practices tend to have better health and mental health as they age. But not to worry if you’re not a service-attender. The research, published last week in the American Journal of Epidemiology, finds that people who prayed or meditated on their own time also reaped similar benefits, including lower risk of substance abuse and depression later on.

The team looked at data from 5,000 people taking part in the long-term Nurses' Health Study II and its next generation Growing Up Today Study (GUTS). They were interested in whether the frequency with which a child/teen attended religious services with their parents or prayed/meditated on their own was correlated with their health and mental health as they grew into their 20s. The young people were followed for anywhere from eight to 14 years.

It turned out that those who attended religious services at least once a week as children or teens were about 18% more likely to report being happier in their 20s than those who never attended services. They were also almost 30% more likely to do volunteer work and 33% less likely to use drugs in their 20s as well.

But what was interesting was that it wasn’t just about how much a person went to services, but it was at least as much about how much they prayed or meditated in their own time. Those who prayed or meditated every day also had more life satisfaction, were better able to process emotions, and were more forgiving compared to those who never prayed/meditated. They were also less likely to have sex at an earlier age and to have a sexually transmitted infection.

"These findings are important for both our understanding of health and our understanding of parenting practices," said study author Ying Chen. "Many children are raised religiously, and our study shows that this can powerfully affect their health behaviors, mental health, and overall happiness and well-being."

Did you miss the part in the definitions that talks about them being mythology?

Dude, the dictionary has definitions of all the gods too, does that mean they exist?

From Dictionary.com:
If notbatman's idea of density as gravity were correct, you would be approaching the gravity of a black hole.

Yeah, I guess you won't admit you lost, oh well. I guess badecker is just more intelligent that everyone else, he knows the proof for a soul but doesn't share it, he also knows god exists but never shares the evidence either. Maybe you are a god yourself badecker. The fact that you are aware of your awareness does not show you have a soul, it shows you have a brain, dummy.

As I have shown in the evolution hoax thread, all your evolution evidence is just talk. It has nothing to back up that what is seen is evolution and not something else. And, a simple Google of "impossible evolution" shows why evolution is just dream talk.

As for the soul and spirit, the proof is the fact that you are aware of your awareness. All you need do is check the definitions in dictionaries and encyclopedias.

The fact that you are using higher reasoning to determine that what I say is horse****, shows that you are attempting to talk away your very soul and spirit which are directing your mind to make such a judgment.