Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade, both of whom recently killed themselves, are part of a wider trend, with suicide having increasedalmost 30 percent since 1999. In fact, in 2016 alone 45,000 Americans took their own lives, a number that includes, shockingly, even some preteen children. Interestingly, this rise in suicide directly corresponds with a decline in something else: Christian faith.
Some observers assert that this is no coincidence. For example, making this case at Town Hall, commentator J. Warner Wallace writes:
Religious believers are … less likely to attempt suicide. One study found that “religiously unaffiliated subjects had significantly more lifetime suicide attempts and more first-degree relatives who committed suicide than subjects who endorsed a religious affiliation.” Another study discovered that women who attended “religious services once per week or more (were) associated with an approximately 5-fold lower rate of suicide compared with (those who) never attend(ed) religious services.” In addition, another survey found that “countries that are more religious tend to have lower suicide rates.”
There is an established relationship between religious belief and suicide. As belief increases, suicide efforts decrease.
Many in this secular age may scoff; billing religion as necessary isn’t fashionable today. Yet while this is a discussion of faith, it doesn’t have to be a matter of faith. For there’s something that’s not faith but fact: human psychology.
Wallace mentions in his piece one psychological reality: We all need a sense of meaning, of purpose, in life, a reason to, as is said, “get out of bed in the morning.” He writes that our focus today too often is “success, rather than significance.”
Belief in God is a matter of faith, but what is also fact are the corollaries of the atheistic worldview. If there’s no God and we have no souls, we’re just some pounds of chemicals and water — organic robots. If we have children, once billed as a primary purpose in life, they’re just organic robots, too. Moreover, if there’s no God to have authored right and wrong, then everything is just “a matter of perspective,” as the relativists are wont to say. Then, as a very spiritually vacant man I once knew put it, “Murder isn’t wrong; it’s just that society says it is.” This is self-evident since if there’s no God, society is all there is to say anything.
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Source: The New American
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