re: NY Times ... ‘happiest of all’ American wives are ‘religious conservatives.’

also this thread reminds me of this recent article i read: How Complaining Physically Rewires Your Brain To Be Anxious And Depressed

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Negativity is a downward spiral, meaning that the more you focus on problems instead of solutions, you eventually start to see the negative side of everything in your life.

While bouts of negative thinking happen on and off, it’s important to let yourself vent, but quickly move on to solutions.

And it’s really worth doing : for one, negativity physically destroys your brain. ” …people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting,” explains Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a psychologist and Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley (2)

Plus, negative thinking reinforces neuropathways associated with that emotion, eventually making it an automatic reaction (3). The same can be said of any repetitive thought or action.

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it's very short and you can get into much more detail in other areas, but it's true. same as the "you are the 5 people you hang out with most" trope.

the strange part is how leftist-SJWs and super religious people have the same motivations (building a better world) but where those motivations come from and how they see the world being built are polar opposites (in most cases, your doomsday cult "churches" are the exact same)

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The Ties That Bind: Is Faith a Global Force for Good or Ill in the Family?

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What in the actual frick?

Just here to bump if this one hasn’t been anchored already.

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I am not much of a philosopher so maybe that's why I am not following the logic that leads one to come to this conclusion

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I'm saying the presuppositions of atheism where the only thing that exists is matter makes it impossible to know anything. An atheist has to borrow from a Christian theist worldview in order to make sense of things and be able to prove it.

Uniformity in nature is necessary for science. Laws of logic are critical for understanding anything and making sense of things. Morality, even, is something everyone uses and considers. None of these things make sense in an atheistic worldview.

The Christian worldview states that God created the world with order and upholds it in a uniform way, so we can expect our experiences to be the same tomorrow as they are today (save for rare encounters where God overrules such things to reveal Himself to humans), rather than in some sort of randomness where we can't expect the future to behave like the past.

The Christian worldview states that God has a mind and is rational and created mankind after His own image, including the ability to reason, so the universe has built-in universal laws of logic for us to make sense of things.

The Christian worldview states that morality is objective because it reflects the very character of God. All people in all times and places are subject to this morality and we are built with a general sense of this morality within us (again because we're made in the image of God). Sin may mar that image, especially over time, but it's there.

Naturalistic and materialistic atheism cannot account for anything non-natural. It can't account for anything general, but only particulars. Nothing in principle, only through each individual experience. It can't account for uniformity in a chaotic and and random universe without purpose or direction. This means we shouldn't be able to use any of the sciences to predict outcomes because there's no reason why the world should be predictable.

It can't account for universal, immaterial principles such as laws of logic, so it can't account for reason and proof of anything; only experience. It can't account for morality whatsoever other than as a pragmatic tool that may be used or not to further the species, but from an objective point of view, no actions are strictly moral or immoral, since atheism cannot provide a general sense of morality, so we can't know what morality is because it doesn't technically exist in a universal sense.

So to conclude, all of these things critical for us to know and understand anything have no basis in an athestic worldview, whereas I believe the Christian worldview can account for these things.

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Or we recognize how lucky we are to be here and make the most of it by having a helluva lot more fun than going to church.

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Some do, but there's no reason for it. There's no "ought" for anything in your worldview. You can do or not do whatever you want, only needing to be mindful of the effects of your actions and calculating if you want to accept those effects. Even then, it's OK to act in ignorance, since it's not wrong to do so.

From a moral stand point, there is no morality for you. Each person has their own standard of what they like or don't like, but you have no basis of judging the actions of anyone else. After all, they are just abiding by their own "moral" preferences. There is no right and wrong, there is just that which happens. You can live for your own happiness, or you can live to make others happy, or you can live to make others sad and miserable. You can live to cause as much carnage and chaos in the world as you can, and that's fine, too. There's no moral judgement in atheism.

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Flat out incorrect and demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of religion as a whole.

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Let me rephrase: there is no basis for moral judgement in atheism.

Atheists believe in uniformity, logic, and morality and use them every day, but they have no basis for those things in their worldview. In order to use those things, they have to assume the Biblical/Christian worldview which does account for those things.

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In order to use those things, they have to assume the Biblical/Christian worldview which does account for those things.

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Wrong again. Religion did not invent morality.

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I have recently gone from atheist to "there is something out there" but reject organized religion outside of the golden rule that it provides.

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Keep searching. Keep looking. You'll find the truth if you keep your mind open to it. I said a prayer for you.