The war on Christians

The global persecution of Christians is the unreported catastrophe of our time

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion?

Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.

In recent days, people around the world have been appalled by images of attacks on churches in Pakistan, where 85 people died when two suicide bombers rushed the Anglican All Saints Church in Peshawar, and in Kenya, where an assault on a Catholic church in Wajir left one dead and two injured.

Those atrocities are indeed appalling, but they cannot truly be understood without being seen as small pieces of a much larger narrative. Consider three points about the landscape of anti-Christian persecution today, as shocking as they are generally unknown. 

According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular observatory based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. Statistically speaking, that makes Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet.

According to the Pew Forum, between 2006 and 2010 Christians faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or de facto, in a staggering total of 139 nations, which is almost three-quarters of all the countries on earth. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed in what the centre calls a ‘situation of witness’ each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians killed somewhere in the world every hour, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for reasons related to their faith.

In effect, the world is witnessing the rise of an entire new generation of Christian martyrs. The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well.

To put flesh and blood on those statistics, all one has to do is look around. In Baghdad, Islamic militants stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation on 31 October 2010, killing the two priests celebrating Mass and leaving a total of 58 people dead. Though shocking, the assault was far from unprecedented; of the 65 Christian churches in Baghdad, 40 have been bombed at least once since the beginning of the 2003 US-led invasion.

The effect of this campaign of violence and intimidation has been devastating for Christianity in the country. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a flourishing Christian population of at least 1.5 million. Today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 500,000, and realistically many believe it could be as low as 150,000. Most of these Iraqi Christians have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed.

India’s northeastern state of Orissa was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as 500 Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals; thousands more were injured and at least 50,000 left homeless. Many Christians fled to hastily prepared displacement camps, where some languished for two years or more.

An estimated 5,000 Christian homes, along with 350 churches and schools, were destroyed. A Catholic nun, Sister Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked and beaten. Police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report, and declined to arrest her attackers.

In Burma, members of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who are strongly Christian, are considered dissidents by the regime and routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour, and murder. In October 2010, the Burmese military launched helicopter strikes in territories where the country’s Christians are concentrated.

A Burmese Air Force source told reporters that the junta had declared these areas ‘black zones’, where military personnel were authorised to attack and kill Christian targets on sight. Though there are no precise counts, thousands of Burmese Christians are believed to have been killed in the offensive.

In Nigeria, the militant Islamic movement ‘Boko Haram’ is held responsible for almost 3,000 deaths since 2009, including 800 fatalities last year alone. 

The movement has made a speciality out of targeting Christians and their churches, and in some cases they seem determined to drive Christians out altogether from parts of the country.

In December 2011, local Boko Haram spokesmen announced that all Christians in the northern Yobe and Borno states had three days to get out, and followed up with a spate of church bombings on 5 and 6 January 2012, which left at least 26 Christians dead, as well as two separate shooting sprees in which eight more Christians died. In the aftermath, hundreds of Christians fled the area, and many are still displaced. Over Christmas last year, at least 15 Christians are believed to have had their throats cut by Boko Haram assailants.

North Korea is widely considered the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian, where roughly a quarter of the country’s 200,000 to 400,000 Christians are believed to be living in forced labour camps for their refusal to join the national cult around founder Kim Il Sung. The anti-Christian animus is so strong that people with Christian grandparents are frozen out of the most important jobs — even though Kim Il Sung’s mother was a Presbyterian deaconess. Since the armistice in 1953 that stabilised the division of the peninsula, some 300,000 Christians in North Korea have disappeared and are presumed dead.

As these examples illustrate, anti-Christian violence is hardly limited to a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Christianity and Islam. In truth, Christians face a bewildering variety of threats, with no single enemy and no single strategy best adapted to curb the violence.

Though fellow believers in the West may have special reason for feeling concern, the reality is that no confessional convictions at all are required to justify alarm over this rising tide of anti-Christian animus.

Because the bulk of the globe’s 2.3 billion Christians today are impoverished and live in the developing world, and because they are often members of ethnic, cultural and linguistic minorities, experts regard their treatment as a reliable indicator of a society’s broader record on human rights and dignity. 

Just as one didn’t have to be Jewish in the 1970s to care about dissident Jews in the Soviet Union, nor black in the 1980s to be outraged by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, one doesn’t have to be Christian today to see the defence of persecuted Christians as a towering priority.

Why are the dimensions of this global war so often overlooked? Aside from the root fact that the victims are largely non-white and poor, and thus not considered ‘newsmakers’ in the classic sense, and that they tend to live and die well off the radar screen of western attention, the global war also runs up against the outdated stereotype of Christianity as the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

Say ‘religious persecution’ to most makers of cultured secular opinion, and they will think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, Bruno and Galileo, the Wars of Religion and the Salem witch trials. Today, however, we do not live on the pages of a Dan Brown potboiler, in which Christians are dispatching mad assassins to settle historical scores. Instead, they’re the ones fleeing assassins others have dispatched.

Moreover, public discussion of religious freedom issues often suffers from two sets of blinders. First, it’s generally phrased in terms of western church/state tensions, such as the recent tug-of-war between religious leaders in the United States and the Obama White House over contraception mandates as part of health care reform, or tensions in the United Kingdom over the 2010 Equality Act and its implications for church-affiliated adoption agencies vis-à-vis same-sex couples. 

The truth is that in the West, a threat to religious freedom means someone might get sued; in many other parts of the world, it means someone might get shot, and surely the latter is the more dramatic scenario.

Secondly, discussion is sometimes limited by an overly narrow conception of what constitutes ‘religious violence’. If a female catechist is killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, because she’s persuading young people to stay out of militias and criminal gangs, one might say that’s a tragedy but not martyrdom, because her assailants weren’t driven by hatred of the Christian faith. 

Yet the crucial point isn’t just what was in the mind of her killers, but what was in the heart of that catechist, who knowingly put her life on the line to serve the gospel. To make her attackers’ motives the only test, rather than her own, is to distort reality.

Whatever the motives for the silence, it’s well past time for it to end. Pope Francis recognised this in remarks during a General Audience last month.

‘When I hear that so many Christians in the world are suffering, am I indifferent, or is it as if a member of my own family is suffering?’ the Pope asked his following. ‘Am I open to that brother or that sister in my family who’s giving his or her life for Jesus Christ?’

In 2011, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, who leads a church with more than its fair share of new martyrs, phrased the same questions more plaintively during a conference in London. He bluntly asked: ‘Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?’

There may be no question about the destiny of Christianity in the early 21st century more deserving of a compelling answer.

Fonte:  http://goo.gl/dYl0wD

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Church going Christians have lower divorce rates

 http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/08/does-religion-protect-against-divorce/

According to this study, divorce rates weren’t lower for religious people — unless they attended services:

Frequency of divorce and separation among 15,714 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985-2005 peaked at around 50 years of age, and increased significantly over the period of study. Ratios of marital breakdown were compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates with different levels of church attendance.  

Frequent Christian attendees were 1.5 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown than nonaffiliates, but there was no difference between nonattending Christian affiliates and those of no religion. Infrequent Christian attendees were 1.3 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown compared to nonaffiliates, suggesting that even infrequent church attendance might have some significance for predicting the persistence of marital solidarity.

Source: “Does Religion Make a Difference? Assessing the Effects of Christian Affiliation and Practice on Marital Solidarity and Divorce in Britain, 1985–2005″ from Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, Volume 51, Issue 6, 2010

This is similar to the research on happiness and religion; religion makes us happier but much of that increase is due to the social aspects of it.

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'Very Religious' People Have Highest Level of Wellbeing, Gallup Survey Finds

Christian Post Reporter

A new Gallup report released Thursday indicates that those who are highly religious have a higher wellbeing rating than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious.

The most recent report in the Gallup poll "Wellbeing" series finds that highly religious individuals have the highest level of wellbeing, even after numerous demographic and geographic variables were controlled.

During the survey, researchers took into account the age, gender, socio-economic status, and where the respondent lived.

They also factored in the variables of marital status and whether or not the individual had children.

In light of these controlled variables, highly religious people scored the highest wellbeing index score of 69.2, while moderately religious people scored a 63.7 and nonreligious people scored a 65.3. Nonreligious people fell in the middle of the wellbeing range.

Researchers conducted 676,000 telephone interviews from Jan. 2010 to Dec. 2011, phoning all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C.

Each participant was asked two questions, the answers to which pooled them into one of three groups: highly religious people, moderately religious people, and nonreligious people.

Highly religious people, which comprised 41 percent of the adult population, were defined as those who said "religion is an important part of daily life and church/synagogue/mosque attendance occurs at least every week or almost every week."

Moderately religious people made up 28.3 percent of those questioned, and 30.7 percent said they were non-religious.

The study is one part in a multiple part series which compares the total wellbeing of religious and nonreligious people in America.

The series' previous studies have reported that highly religious people overall have better emotional health and physical health.

The study did not identify a precise reason why highly religious people exhibit the highest level of wellbeing. It suggests that perhaps the social networking which accompanies a religious congregation, the amount of time spent meditating, faith in a higher power, and the religious mechanisms for dealing with worry and loss can all reduce stress and promote happiness.

It also suggests that perhaps the conclusion is reversed, and individuals with a higher wellbeing seek religious institutions.

"It is possible that Americans who have higher wellbeing are more likely to choose to be religious than those with lower wellbeing, or that some third variable could be driving certain segments of the U.S. population to be more religious and to have higher wellbeing," the report stated.

Gallup research will continue its survey series, studying further factors that indicate a relationship between wellbeing and religion.

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“We are really before a monster that is destroying everything we hold dear”

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SAO PAULO, Brazil, December 21, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Although Marxism appears to have died with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has only metamorphosed, and is now threatening culture in many nations at every level, according to one of Brazil’s best known priests.

In an exclusive video interview with LifeSiteNews, Fr. Azevedo tells LifeSiteNews that Marxists have moved into the cultural sphere following the discrediting of their economic views, and are now seeking to subvert all of the institutions of society from within.

“They have to have control of everything that produces culture. So first of all, the Church is important. But also universities, and schools, newspapers, the media and such. And of course in that battle they are in, they have everything in their hands right now,” Azevedo told LifeSiteNews. However, he added, we must realize that “God is with us.”

According to Azevedo, cultural Marxism not only incorporates the premises of Marx, but also Nietzsche and Freud. The goal is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization at its roots. Out of this destruction, we are assured, a utopia will emerge.

Among the institutions targeted for termination, said Azevedo, is the family.

“They think that the family is oppression, so once you have a family, that means you have a man, the male is oppressing the woman, and oppressing the kids, because he is imposing on them,” Azevedo said.

“So once you have a traditional family, you have a the man as ruler of the family and they think they have to break that down, and to have an equal society, you have to have people grow up in a different environment.”

In Brazil, the country with the largest Catholic population in the world, Marxists have targeted the Church, and large numbers of priests and bishops have embraced an ideology that replaces the spiritual teachings of Christ with a Marxist imitation known as “liberation theology.”

“Now what they are trying to do is to get to Christianity and change it from the inside,” said Azevedo. “So they keep the religious words, but they change the concept inside of the word.”

“When they talk about the kingdom of God, we as Christians, when we talk about the kingdom of God, we believe that you are talking about the kingdom of heaven, so you are talking about something that is not here in this world.”

“Well, they start saying that we are working here for the kingdom of God, and we want to bring about the kingdom here in this world. So in reality what they are talking about is the socialist society that they dream, the utopia that they think is going tho happen, is the kingdom of God.”

“They use the same words. It sounds like something Catholic, like something Christian, but at the same time you realize there is something strange about it, because there is something missing, and what is missing is everything that relates to the transcendental, to heaven, to life after death. Everything they do is they apply here on Earth.”

This rejection of spiritual realities is coupled with the exaltation of man as Nietzsche’s “superman,” who can determine good and evil for himself, as the serpent promised in the Garden of Eden, Azevedo said.

Citizens of Brazil and the United States are disarmed in the face of cultural Marxism, said Azevedo, because they naively believe that Marxism died with the fall of the Soviet Union.

“We are really before a monster that is destroying everything we hold dear, everything that we hold precious and sacred,” he said.

Fr. Azevedo is well-known in Brazil for his clear explanations and firm defense of the Catholic faith, which he presents in his television show for the New Song (Cancao Nova) network, as well as his blog, Christo Nihil Praeponere (Placing Nothing Before Christ)

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The Religion of Evolution

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I was asked recently during an interview if I thought that the Theory of Evolution was a religion. I said that I think it is.

If evolution is responsible for everything that has evolved--everything, then it is worthy of praise. What it did was miraculous, and time is the miracle-method it used.

Its prophet was Charles Darwin (the faithful can pay homage to his facial hair in the Natural History Museum, in London), and Richard Dawkins is the sitting pope.

According to his decree, if you disagree with the canon of evolution you are "wicked." So those who don't believe, should therefore be excommunicated from the realm of science.

The "Bible" of the Darwinian believer is On the Origin of Species. If you write a mere Introduction that disagrees with its sacred contents, it is tantamount to blasphemy. Be prepared for an inquisition from believers and threats of book burnings.

So, if you believe in evolution, don’t question dating methods, or the credibility of revered paleontologists, or the learned priestly professors.

Just believe.

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Leftism as a Religion

Liberals become easy to understand and predict once you realize that leftism is a political religion for those who are ostensibly irreligious. It fulfills the desire for a transcendent purpose and ultimate destiny in liberals that religion fulfills in others. (If you haven't realized this already, just watch some aging hipsters swaying in ecstasy to John Lennon's "Imagine" at a Democrat rally sometime).

To you or me, the idea that you're going to achieve a better-run or more just world by placing absolute power with no accountability into the hands of a select few completely defies reason, common sense, and everything we know about human nature and the corrupting influence of power, and has probably been more thoroughly refuted by history than any other idea.

Additionally, the idea that a handful of people could have the knowledge and the capability to competently micromanage the lives of hundreds of millions of people is self-evidently absurd.

But liberals are able to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the government, because they are driven by religious longing. In their religion, the government plays the role of God, and is the key to achieving utopia (ie secular heaven) through social engineering. In reality, the government is just a collection of corruptible people like you and me, but liberals deify it in their minds, and attribute to it the same traits that we attribute to God: omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence.

So, for instance, liberals are horrified by private insurance corporations having the choice to refuse to take a loss by insuring those with preexisting conditions (even though you can go to a different insurance company, or try to raise money yourself), but they're happy as clams about the government having the ability to deny you treatment outright.

This is contradictory, but it's understandable once you realize that in their minds, government bureaucrats are automatically selfless, wise, just, and dedicated to "equality" in all that they do, just by virtue of being part of the all-knowing, all-loving government.

Leftists continually push for a more authoritarian government because their religious fervor blinds them to the fact that it's just a bunch of regular fallen humans at the helm and nothing more, and because their religious system requires government power to engineer society in order to bring about leftist heaven (aka "utopia" aka "social justice" aka "human brotherhood" aka "progress" aka "equality").

That's what makes leftism a particularly dangerous religion. For Christians, our heaven is not of this world, and we are able to separate politics and religion to a significant degree (for instance, Christ's admonition to "give unto Caesar what is Caesar's"). Our only religious imperative with regards to unbelievers is to share the Word with them.

For liberals, on their other hand, politics *is* religion, and to bring about their heaven, they believe they must use the authoritarian state to coerce and re-engineer humanity into their idea of perfection.

And since their idea of perfection is impossible to achieve and things never operate according to their plans, they are always desperate for greater and more centralized power in the belief that it will finally give them what they need.

Leftism is similar to Islam in that both require coercive political action in this world to bring the rest of humanity into line, so it's not surprising that these are the two religions with the highest body counts.

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The tantalising proof that belief in God makes you happier and healthier

By Tom Knox

God has had a tough time over the past few years. On TV, in newspapers and on the internet, the debate as to whether faith has any relevance in a sceptical modern world has been as ubiquitous as it has been vigorous.

And it has been pretty clear which side is the most splenetic.

From Richard Dawkins’ powerful atheist polemics to Christopher Hitchens’ public derision of the Roman Catholic Tony Blair and Stephen Hawking’s proclamation that the universe ‘has no need for God’, it seems that unbelievers have had the dwindling faithful on the run.

Or have they?

Proof? Research has found that religious believers have a healthy and happier life, but what is the secret and how does religion work its magic?

As research for my latest novel, Bible Of The Dead, I have spent months investigating the science of faith versus atheism, and discovered startling and unexpected evidence. It might just change the way you think about the whole debate, as it has changed my view.

I am not a religious zealot. On the contrary, I was a teenage atheist. And although in adulthood I have had a vague and fuzzy feeling that ‘there must be something out there’, I was never a regular church-goer. But what I have discovered, on my voyage through the science of faith, has astonished me.

My journey began a couple of years ago when I was travelling in Utah, the home of Mormonism. During my first week there, I approached this eccentric American religion with a typically European cynicism. I teased Mormons about their taste in ‘spiritual undergarments’; I despaired at being unable to find a decent cappuccino (Mormons are forbidden coffee, as well as alcohol, smoking, tea and premarital sex).

But then I had something of an epiphany. One night, after a long dinner, I was walking back to my hotel in downtown Salt Lake City at 2am and I suddenly realised: I felt safe. As any transatlantic traveller knows, this is a pretty unusual experience in an American city after midnight.

Why did I feel safe? Because I was in a largely Mormon city, and Mormons are never going to mug you. They might bore or annoy you when they come knocking on your door, touting their faith, but they are not going to attack you.

The Mormons’ wholesome religiousness, their endless and charitable kindliness, made their city a better place. And that made me think: Why was I so supercilious about such happy, hospitable people? What gave me the right to sneer at their religion?

From that moment I took a deeper, more rigorous interest in the possible benefits of religious faith. Not one particular creed, but all creeds. And I was startled by what I found.

For a growing yet largely unnoticed body of scientific work, amassed over the past 30 years, shows religious belief is medically, socially and psychologically beneficial.

In 2006, the American Society of Hypertension established that church-goers have lower blood pressure than the non-faithful.

Likewise, in 2004, scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that college students involved in religious activities are more likely to have better mental and emotional health than those who do not.

Meanwhile, in 2006, population researchers at the University of Texas discovered that the more often you go to church, the longer you live.

Attack: Christopher Hitchens made a public derision of Tony Blair's decision to becoming a Roman Catholic

As they put it: ‘Religious attendance is associated with adult mortality in a graded fashion: there is a seven-year difference in life expectancy between those who never attend church and those who attend weekly.’

Exactly the same outcome was recently reported in the American Journal of Public Health, which studied nearly 2,000 older Californians for five years. Those who attended religious services were 36 per cent less likely to die during this half-decade than those who didn’t.

Even those who attended a place of worship irregularly — implying a less than ardent faith — did better than those who never attended.

Pretty impressive. But there’s more; so much more that it’s positively surreal.

In 1990, the American Journal of Psychiatry discovered believers with broken hips were less depressed, had shorter hospital stays and could even walk further when they were discharged compared to their similarly broken-hipped and hospitalised, but comparatively heathen peers.

It’s not just hips. Scientists have revealed that believers recover from breast cancer quicker than non-believers; have better outcomes from coronary disease and rheumatoid arthritis; and are less likely to have children with meningitis.

Intriguing research in 2002 showed that believers have more success with IVF than non-believers.

A 1999 study found that going to a religious service or saying a few prayers actively strengthened your immune system.

These medical benefits accrue even if you adjust for the fact that believers are less likely to smoke, drink or take drugs.

And faith doesn’t just heal the body; it salves the mind, too. In 1998, the American Journal of Public Health found that depressed patients with a strong ‘intrinsic faith’ (a deep personal belief, not just a social inclination to go to a place of worship) recovered 70 per cent faster than those who did not have strong faith.

Another study, in 2002, showed that prayer reduced ‘adverse outcomes in heart patients’.

But perhaps this is just an American thing? After all, those Bible-bashing Yanks are a bit credulous compared to us more sceptical Europeans, aren’t they?

Proclamation: Professor Stephen Hawking has said that the 'universe has no need for God'

Not so. In 2008, Professor Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics and Doctor Orsolya Lelkes of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research conducted a vast survey of Europeans. They found that religious believers, compared to non-believers, record less stress, are better able to cope with losing jobs and divorce, are less prone to suicide, report higher levels of self-esteem, enjoy greater ‘life purpose’ and report being more happy overall.

What is stunning about this research is that the team didn’t go looking for this effect — it came to them unexpectedly. ‘We originally started the research to work out why some European countries had more generous unemployment benefits than others,’ says Professor Clark.

But as they went on, the pattern of beneficial faith presented itself. ‘Our analysis suggested religious people suffered less psychological harm from unemployment than the non-religious. Believers had higher levels of life satisfaction.’

So what’s going on? How does religion work this apparent magic?

One of the latest surveys to suggest that religious people are happier than the non-religious was conducted by Professors Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, from Harvard, and published last year.

They discovered that many of the health benefits of religion materialise only if you go to church regularly and have good friends there. In other words, it’s the ‘organised’ part of organised religion that does a lot of the good stuff.

Going to a friendly church, temple or mosque gives you a strong social network and a ready-made support group, which in turn gives you a more positive outlook on life — and offers vital help in times of need. The Harvard scientists were so startled by their findings that they considered altering their own religious behaviour.

As Professor Lim said: ‘I am not a religious person, but . . . I personally began to think about whether I should go to church. It would make my mum happy.’

But if the ‘congregation’ effect is one explanation for the good health of churchgoers, it’s not the only one. Other surveys have found that intrinsic faith is also important.

For instance, a study of nearly 4,000 older adults for the U.S. Journal of Gerontology revealed that atheists had a notably increased chance of dying over a six-year period than the faithful.

Crucially, religious people lived longer than atheists even if they didn’t go regularly to a place of worship. This study clearly suggests there is a benefit in pure faith alone — perhaps this religiousness works by affording a greater sense of inner purpose and solace in grief.

This begs the question: Given all this vast evidence that religion is good for you, how come the atheists seem so set against it?

They pride themselves on their rationality, yet so much of the empirical evidence indicates that God is good for you. Surely, then, it is the atheists, not the devout, who are acting irrationally?

All this will come as no surprise to many students of genetics and evolution, who have long speculated that religious faith might be hard- wired into the human mind.

For instance, twin studies (research on identical siblings who are separated at birth) show that religion is a heritable characteristic: if one twin is religious, the other is likely to be a believer as well, even when raised by different parents.

Prayer: Studys have found that even those with a small connection to religion can feel the benefits of it

Neurologists are making exciting progress in locating the areas of the brain, primarily the frontal cortex, ‘responsible’ for religious belief — parts of the brain that seem designed to accommodate faith. This research even has its own name: neurotheology.

Why might we be hard-wired to be religious? Precisely because religion makes us happier and healthier, and thus makes us have more children.

In the purest of Darwinian terms, God isn’t just good for you, He’s good for your genes, too.

All of which means that, contrary to expectation, it is the atheists who are eccentric, flawed and maladaptive, and it’s the devout who are healthy, well-adjusted and normal.

Certainly, in purely evolutionary terms, atheism is a blind alley. Across the world, religious people have more children than non-religious (go forth and multiply!), while atheist societies are the ones with the lowest birth rates.

The Czech Republic is a classic example. It proclaims itself the most atheist country in Europe, if not the world; it also has a puny birthrate of 1.28 per woman, one of the lowest on the planet (so soon there won’t be any godless Czechs to proclaim their atheism).

The existence of atheism is therefore something of an anomaly. But then again, anomalies are not unknown in evolution.

Think of the dodo or the flightless parrot, doomed to extinction. Are atheists similarly blighted? Are Richard Dawkins and his type destined to vanish off the face of the Earth — the victims of their own intellectual arrogance?

That’s not for me to say; it’s for you to ponder. All I do know is that reassessing the research has changed the way I think about faith. These days I go to church quite a lot, especially when I am travelling and researching my books.

For instance, the other day I found myself in Cambridge — the home of Stephen Hawking — and took the opportunity to do some sightseeing of the city’s intellectual landmarks.

I strolled by the labs where Hawking does his brilliant work, popped into the pub where they announced the discovery of DNA and admired the library where Charles Darwin studied. As I did, I was in awe at the greatness of Man’s achievements.

And then I went to Evensong at King’s College Chapel, and it was beautiful, sublime and uplifting. And I felt a very different kind of awe.

Sneer at faith all you like. Just don’t assume science is on your side.

Bible Of The Dead is published by HarperCollins on March 17.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1358421/The-tantalising-proof-belief-God-makes-happier-healthier.html#ixzz1EXo8o4oC

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Very Religious Americans Lead Healthier Lives

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Relationship holds when controlling for key demographics

by Frank Newport, Sangeeta Agrawal, and Dan Witters

This is the third article in a special multipart series on religiosity and wellbeing in America. The first article explored the relationship between religiosity and wellbeing across the Well-Being Index and sub-indexes. The second article examined religiosity and emotional health. This piece explores specific components within the Healthy Behavior Index.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Very religious Americans are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious. The most religious Americans score a 66.3 on the Gallup-Healthways Healthy Behavior Index compared with 60.6 among those who are moderately religious and 58.3 for the nonreligious. This relationship, based on an analysis of more than 550,000 interviews, is statistically significant after controlling for major demographic and regional variables.

For the purposes of this analysis, an American's relative degree of religiousness is based on responses to two questions asking about the importance of religion and church attendance, yielding three specific groups:

• Very religious -- Religion is an important part of daily life and church/synagogue/mosque attendance occurs at least every week or almost every week. This group constitutes 43.7% of the adult population.
• Moderately religious -- All others who do not fall into the very religious or nonreligious groups but who gave valid responses on both religion questions. This group constitutes 26.6% of the adult population.
• Nonreligious -- Religion is not an important part of daily life and church/synagogue/mosque attendance occurs seldom or never. This group constitutes 29.7% of the adult population.

Previous research has shown that religiosity, defined either as church attendance or self-reported importance of religion, is related to age, gender, race and ethnicity, region and state of the country, socioeconomic status, marital status, and child-bearing status. Because wellbeing is also related to these variables, this analysis statistically controls for all of these characteristics.

Very Religious Smoke Less, Exercise More, and Eat Healthier

Very religious Americans make healthier choices than their moderately religious and nonreligious counterparts across all four of the Healthy Behavior Index metrics, including smoking, healthy eating, and regular exercise. Smoking is one area of particular differentiation between the very religious and less religious Americans, with the nonreligious 85% more likely to be smokers than those who are very religious.

Very religious Americans also outperform the moderately religious and nonreligious in terms of eating healthy and getting frequent exercise.

Implications

There are a number of factors that could contribute to very religious Americans' healthier lifestyle choices. Some of these factors are likely overt products of religious doctrine itself, including rules related to smoking and substance abuse. Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, strictly adhere to vegetarian lifestyles free of alcohol and smoking, while orthodox Mormons and Muslims do not drink alcohol. In some Christian denominations, gluttony and sloth are considered two of the seven deadly sins, and many evangelical faiths frown on drinking and smoking. The Bible indicates that one's body is the "temple of God," which could in turn help explain the relationship between religious orthodoxy and exercise and certain types of food consumption.

It is possible, of course, that the noted relationship between health and religiosity could go in the other direction -- that people who are healthier are the most likely to make the decision to be religious. This could be particularly relevant in terms of church attendance, one of the constituent components of Gallup's definition of religiousness. Healthier people may be more likely and able to attend religious services than those who are less healthy.

It may also be possible that certain types of individuals are more likely to make healthy lifestyle choices and more likely to choose to be highly religious. The most parsimonious explanation, however, may be the most intuitive: Those who capitalize on the social and moral outcomes of religious norms and acts are more likely to lead lives filled with healthier choices.

Gallup will continue to explore the relationship between wellbeing and religion in future articles.

About the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index tracks U.S. wellbeing and provides best-in-class solutions for a healthier world. To learn more, please visit well-beingindex.com.

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Prayer Relieves Mind in Many Ways, Study Finds

Source

Getting on your knees and looking to the heavens may really bring comfort during tough times, new research finds.

This will come as no surprise to many Americans, as 75 percent say they pray on a weekly basis in order to manage hard situations, including illness, and emotions such as sadness and anger, according to the study researcher citing Pew Research Center data. And most Americans also think God is involved in their everyday lives and concerned with their personal well-being.

The new study aimed to find out how prayer leads to mental relief. Results suggested prayer can serve as a distraction and even as sort of a punching bag.

Always available

Lead researcher Shane Sharp, a graduate student studying sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducted in-depth interviews with 62 victims of violent relationships with intimate partners. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 72 (averaging 41) and represented a wide swath of the United States in geographic, educational and racial terms, with largely Christian backgrounds.

Results showed that in general that God or another figure from religion acted as a support system for the participants. The figure had certain perceived characteristics, such as being loving, powerful and caring, that influenced why participants sought him or her out. But unlike a flesh-and-blood shoulder to cry on or an abusive partner to rail at, God was available whenever and wherever the participant reached out, Sharp said.

"If they vented their anger to that abusive partner, the result was likely to be more violence," Sharp told LiveScience. "But they could be angry at God while praying, without fear of reprisal."

For those who are not religious, Sharp said, the findings of the study may not apply unless they look to another "virtual" friend, such as a celebrity, in times of crises. [Thinking of God Calms Believers, Stresses Atheists]

Victims' stories

One participant, Monica, a white 25-year-old, said she used prayer to manage her anger over being abused by a loved one. It's "kinda like getting something off your chest, you know. I mean, you're kinda talking about it with somebody, you know. I mean, it's just a way to kinda voice your opinion, you know, about something, or, you know, let the Lord know, you know, how you would like something," she was quoted as saying.

Sharp added that prayer seemed to help self-image. "During prayer, victims came to see themselves as they believed God saw them. Since these perceptions were mostly positive, it helped raise their senses of self-worth that counteracted their abusers' hurtful words," Sharp said.

Marianne, a white Southern Baptist in her early 50s who had been married to an abusive man for nearly 20 years, sighed as she said: "I guess the number one thing for me would be the realization that there's, there was, the God out there the whole time where I'm out thinking, well, 'This is my life so screwed up. I need to get drunk. No, I need to take drugs. No, I need to kill myself.' ... And just to, to be able to just sit down and think that God wanted to communicate with me and that I'm not a scumbag in front of his eyes no matter what. Wow, how cool is that?"

Prayer also served as a handy distraction for some, Sharp found. Folding one's hands and focusing on this conversation provided a reprieve from the anxiety of an abusive relationship.

Yet the consequences of prayer weren't always positive. "For some, through prayer they told me they learned to forgive their abusive partners, to let go of their anger and resentment," Sharp said. "But that's a double-edged sword. It's good for those who are out of that violent relationship to let go of it to a certain extent. But if they're still in their violent relationship, it may postpone their decision to leave, and that can be bad."

Religion is complicated

That double-edged sword highlights the complexity of religion and its effects. "Religion is often pointed to as a mostly positive or mostly negative thing. It's way more complicated than that," said Sharp, whose results are detailed in the current issue of the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

Other research out this month shows that religious people are happier because of the social networks they build by attending religious services. Past research has shown that teen birth rates are higher in highly religious states, and another study suggested kids with religious parents are better behaved than others.

The findings have practical implications for mental health experts and researchers who study well-being. Sharp said future research should consider prayer as an interaction instead of a one-sided act.

In addition, "psychotherapists and other mental health professionals can try to develop similar, non-prayer ways to accomplish these tasks," Sharp told LiveScience. "Since one way that prayer helps is by providing another who will provide positive, self-esteem-boosting feedback, mental health professionals can develop therapy programs that will be sure to include positive, self-esteem-boosting feedback that can counteract negative feedback in patients' lives."

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Jim Jones was a communist

November 18 is the anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, the day in 1978 that moonbats began their time-honored tradition of guzzling Kool-Aid. In Guyana, they did it on behalf of communist cult leader Jim Jones, who was too cowardly to drink the cyanide-laced drink himself and had to be shot by one of his henchmen. His wife left instructions for the money they milked from their gullible slaves to be donated to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Typically, the Jonestown Massacre has been spun by our liberal ruling class as some sort of religious episode. This is because Jones and his followers worshiped the same thing liberals do: coercive collectivism. As Original Dissent commented,

Our media have concealed, misrepresented, or downplayed the key element in the philosophy of Jim Jones. He was a long-time dedicated Marxist communist who admired totalitarian communist dictatorships such as the Soviet Union and Cuba so much that he built one of his own in Guyana. It was tiny, with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, but it had many striking resemblances to the dictatorships it was modeled after. The inhabitants were not free to leave Jonestown. Those who tried to escape were severely punished. Family members were kept in Jonestown as hostages to enable the dictator to exert control over those who were on the outside. The inhabitants were cut off from free communication with the outside world. The news they got was filtered through the dictator. They were subjected to the constant blare of exhortations and instructions by loudspeaker, one of the techniques of the Chinese communists. They were forced to attend lengthy meetings, listening to the political harrangues of Jones, after having worked ten to twelve hours in the fields. This is another technique of the Chinese communists. They were trained in what to say to visitors and were as adept as the Chinese, and Soviets in pulling on a good show and concealing the harsh reality. They were not permitted to own any substantial personal property, making them totally dependent on the dictator for their subsistence and survival. They were in mortal fear of the dictator's armed guards and "hit squads," which they believed would track them down and murder them if they should leave. They were punished if they complained about food or living conditions, and they were afraid to express dissatisfaction even privately. There was no religious observance in the community, apart from the obeisance to the all-powerful dictator, Jones. The workers were poorly fed, poorly housed and overworked, while the dictator lived in luxury.

Jones, who claimed to be the reincarnation of the first Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, would have fit right in with the Obama Administration. Like Anita Dunn, he was an open admirer of the tyrant with the highest body count in human history, Mao Zedong. In 1978, he traveled to Cuba to meet with Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers, whose descendents have loyal friends in the twisted racist farce Obama has made of the Department of Justice. While Jones's friendships were not as unsavory as Obama's, they did include communist Angela Davis and wife of the worst pre-Obama president, Rosalyn Carter.

As for the supposed religious angle:

Mrs. Jim Jones told The New York Times in 1977 that her husband had decided when he was 21 years old that the way to achieve his Marxist goals was to mobilize people through religion. "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion," she said, adding that he had once slammed a Bible on the table and said, "I've got to destroy this paper idol!" (New York Times, 11/26/78, p. 20.) The Times informs us that Jones "was openly contemptuous of religion among his associates." (New York Times, 11/21/78, p. A 16). But he used religion to entice new recruits and to deceive naive outsiders. After the victims were hooked, he used sex, blackmail, intimidation and psychological dependence to manipulate them. At Jonestown, where there were no outsiders to be deceived, there were no religious services or discussions of religion. (Washington Post, 11/25/78, p. A 3.) Jones had so corrupted people who were once good Christians that they would commit adulterous or homosexual acts with him or others on his command. They would even commit murder at his command, even the murder of their own children, as we now know. Religion was nothing but a cover for Jones' communist ideology, but most reporters, like a pack of greyhounds, went chasing after the fake rabbit.

They did this not due to extreme stupidity but because then as now, the "mainstream" press shared Jones's ideological objectives.

Inevitably, communism leads to piles of corpses. Jonestown was humbled by the body counts mounted in China, Russia, and Cambodia — but over 900 people did die there 32 years ago today. So lift your glasses of Kool-Aid in pride, moonbats, and toast a historic milestone in the development of collectivism.

Applied moonbattery at Jonestown.

Original

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Religious North Dakota and Economic Sucess

In a few years from now, if North Dakota gets infested with atheism, atheists will claim that the economic sucess of the place owes itself to their religious worldview, just like they claim the same for the economic sucess of nothern european nations.

Conservative North Dakota still has the lowest rate of unemployment in the United States. The state unemployment rate is 3%.[1]

Another positive aspect of North Dakota is that according to a CUNY 2000 religious survey, it appeared to have the lowest per capita number of atheists in the United States (people who answered "no religion" on a survey).[2]

The Bible declares, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1). North Dakota, which contains plenty of Conservative Christians, certainly seems to be a shining example of this Bible verse. North Dakota has more churches per capita than any state in the United States.[3]

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Teleological Evolution and the Clash of Worldviews

An interesting post by Michael Egnor over Evolution News & Views, the Discovery Institute's group blog. He points out the "civil war" that is brewing between atheistic evolutionists and theistic evolutionists (whom he calls "accomodationalists") over the compatibility of science and religion.

We are entering an era in which a substantial and loud minority of atheist scientists and philosophers are claiming that science validates and depends on atheism and materialism. A ferocious fight has broken out in the pro-Darwinist blogosphere over this question: are philosophical naturalism and atheism essential to good science? Some of those on the side of accommodation with religion no doubt are atheists who believe that accommodation of religious beliefs is necessary for tactical reasons; others, such as Ken Miller and Francis Collins, are scientists who are Christians and who see their science as entirely compatible with their theism.

This debate is about whether worship at the materialist/atheist altar is a prerequisite for good science. My sense of it is that the accomodationists have easily gained the upper hand. The atheist insistence that science depends on and validates atheism is historically ignorant and philosophically incoherent.

That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed.

Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology --Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be understood without reference to teleology. Science is saturated with reference to purpose and goals of natural things. Atheists deny teleology, because acceptance of teleology in nature raises devastating questions about their atheist faith.

Fundamentalist atheists-- secular priests-- fight ferociously to extinguish challenges to their faith, because they understand that to raise the question of teleology in nature is to answer it. Atheism, for good reason, fears questions.

I could have told them that it would eventually come to this. The actual evidences for God's work of creation are all around us in nature, and people can only go for so long in ignoring them before the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable and people have to deal with them. This is the obvious teleology in nature that Egnor references. It's also why evolutionists so often speak of evolution in teleological terms - e.g., "Evolution developed the ability for bombardier beetles to defend themselves chemically", etc. Evolutionists will unwittingly attribute to evolution independent and intelligent powers of creation - even to the point of approaching a position of atheistic "intelligent design." The reason is because the evidence of design is all around us - they can't get around it, and subconsciously will accede to it, even if consciously they try to deny it.

We need to understand that the issue of origins is not about science, per se. It is about the clash of underlying worldviews. "Evolution" is no more obvious from empirical science than is phlogiston or the aether. Both evolution and creation (as well as Intelligent Design, which really occupies a medial position) rely upon inference from forensic evidences, and hence are based upon subjective interpretation - which gets you right back to worldviews. Science, as it is commonly understood to rely upon empiricism, is completely incompetent to deal with the actual events of our origins, at least until somebody builds a time machine that actually works.

Hence, both creationism and evolutionism are dependent upon faith. This is something that creationists will readily admit, but is something that evolutionists, in their zeal to promote the fiction of the incontestability of evolution, avoid like the plague. Yet, as the article points out, hard-core evolutionists really do approach their belief system in ways that are amazing similar to religion. They have a priesthood of people like Dawkins and PZ Myers to whom they go for consolation and reassurance. They have a set of sacred scriptures which they study to firm themselves up on what they believe. They have a set of orthodox dogmas that can get you in a lot of trouble if you dissent from them. I remember years ago a discussion I had with an evolutionist on some forum somewhere. I had basically argued down every point he made, and destroyed every argument he tried to make for evolution. A few months later, I was doing some ego-googling, and came across another forum where this same fellow had gone shortly thereafter to try to reinforce himself in his evolutionism by confessing his doubts about evolution and seeking absolution for his sin from some other guy who was likely the Darwinian equivalent of a small country parish-priest. Their exchange really seemed for all the world like a confession and reinstatement to faith. It was, frankly, kind of creepy.

But that's just it - evolutionism in not science, it is not synonymous with science, nor is it necessarily always compatible with science. It is a worldview and a belief system.

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