Topic: Health and Religion - page 65. (Read 210987 times)

Euthanasia is becoming a major cause of death in the Netherlands. Seems it may only be a matter of time now before it becomes a full blown industry complete with target numbers and quotas.

Euthanasia has become a common way to die in the Netherlands, accounting for 4.5 percent of deaths, according to researchers who say requests are increasing from people who are not terminally ill.
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 People must be “suffering unbearably” with no hope of relief — but their condition does not have to be fatal.
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“These are old people who may have health problems, but none of them are life-threatening. They’re old, they can’t get around, their friends are dead and their children don’t visit anymore,” he said. “This kind of trend cries out for a discussion. Do we think their lives are still worthwhile?”

A man lies on a hospital bed, conscious and fully aware of his surroundings. As family members look on, a doctor injects him with two drugs.

The first renders the patient unconscious, putting him in coma, the second, a muscle relaxant, stops his heart.

Time, now, is very much of the essence. A few minutes are allowed for the relatives’ final farewells before he is pronounced dead and a team of surgeons swings into action, removing his liver, kidneys and pancreas.

As each organ is extracted, it is immediately transferred to separate operating theatres where medics are on hand to transplant it into a patient who lies waiting.

Slick, fast-paced and brutally efficient — while it may sound like some sci-fi scene set in the future, in fact, this chain of events unfolded in a hospital in Holland earlier this year.

What, of course, makes it so extraordinary is that the man, who has not been identified, died at the hands of a doctor.

Having suffered a stroke he had decided that his quality of life was so poor that he wanted to end his life. In the Netherlands, he was able to do this because euthanasia has been legal since 2002.
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An academic paper published last week by a Dutch medical researcher explores the possibility that, in future, doctors might be allowed to remove organs from euthanasia patients who are still alive.

What is being suggested is that the patient could be anaesthetised — but not killed — and their organs removed, including the heart and lungs. It would be the removal of the heart that would lead to death.
Medically, this would mean that organs for transplant — hearts and lungs in particular — were more likely to be viable.

The Dutch medical fraternity insists there are as yet no plans to go down this route, but even the discussion of such a possibility has prompted campaigners to warn of the dangers of a slippery slope.

‘The trend is deeply worrying,’ says anti-euthanasia campaigner Lord Carlile of Berriew, who warns that when patients are at their lowest ebb in the immediate aftermath of a serious illness — for example, a stroke — they could be susceptible to persuasion.

‘The pressure to agree to provide a transplantable heart, lung or liver might be huge,’ he says.

‘The evidence of protection of the vulnerable in Belgium and Holland is sketchy at best. The boundaries of euthanasia are pushed yet further back and the potential for doctors to “engineer” these events grows.

If deity is denied - or, nowadays, not so much 'denied' as ruled-out a priori on the basis of unexamined and unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions regarding the nature of reality...

Without deity then Life devolves to how we feel about life, currently; and therefore all possible problems devolve to therapy - because the solution to all possible problems is to change how we feel about them. Full stop - nothing more to be said.

And, changing how we feel about things is not innocuous; because it includes the possibility of Not-feeling. IN other worlds any and all problems can be solved temporarily by obliterating feelings; perhaps by obliterating awareness, obliterating The Self; maybe with drugs, surgery or some other technology...

Or we abolish feelings by death. Because without deity - death is the end of consciousness.

So all possible problems can permanently be solved by death...

Further, all problems can be prevented - by never being alive in the first place. Prevention of life.

So the therapeutic society is continually sliding down a slippery slope towards the idea of universal and permanent extinction of Life, as the one sure way of preventing suffering.

Death is the ultimate therapy for everything!

OR - if that sounds... wrong to you; then you might discover and reconsider your metaphysical assumptions which lead to that conclusion; then re-examine the possibility of deity?...

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.
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Scientists don’t actually know what’s causing the sperm count crisis.

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

The placebo effect for example, is very real.

Health and religion. Two important things that can not be separated. Because according to my religion (Moslem). Many activities of worship that can make our body become healthy. For example solat. In solat one of them there is a prostration movement, where the head is flat with the ground so the brain will contain a lot of oxygen that can facilitate the performance of the brain. And many other examples. So healthy in religion will always be healthy in life. 

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.

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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.

You don't know that God DOESN'T extend the lives of people at times. King Hezekiah in the Old Testament prayed that he would not die, and God extended his life for 15 years. There are many more who have not been recorded in the Bible.

God extends the lives of people who believe in Jesus salvation. God extends their lives forever, even though they die in this life for a short time. That's why Jesus often talks about those who have died that they have fallen asleep.

God doesnt's give you more lifetime or the ability to be better than others, you're totally wrong.

Yet, God intervenes and helps those who trust in Him and call on Him.

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.

But the Bible isn't fiction. Study the history of how the Bible came about. Study it in detail, and you will see that it is a historical, written record of events that happened.