SUICIDE AND SECULARISM

 More than any other indicator, suicide says, “Life isn’t worth living.” What is causing the explosion of suicides among those who have everything to live for – our 10-24 year olds:

·       Suicide rates among youth ages 10 to 24 increased by 57% between 2007 and 2018, data released Thursday from the National Center for Health Statistics shows, rising from almost 7 per 100,000 population to nearly 11. Comparing three-year averages from 2007 to 2009 to the time period between 2016 and 2018 brought the increase down to 47%...The U.S. suicide rate among all age groups was 14 per 100,000 in 2018. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/suicides-among-us-kids-young-adults-jumped-57percent-in-past-decade/ar-BB18ViMs?ocid=se

How can we explain this phenomenon? Many explanations are offered:

·       “There are many reasons to suspect that suicide rates will increase this year too, not just because of Covid-19 but because stress and anxiety seem to be permeating every aspect of our lives,” said Shannon Monnat, co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University. (Ibid.)

It does not seem that environmental factors are significant. This phenomenon is no respecter of the US States. Similar increases are found throughout the States. Instead, it seems to be associated with the growth of secularism, today’s reigning Western religion:

·       Diana Graines, in Rolling Stone, noted that prior to the 1960s, teenage suicide was virtually nonexistent among American youth. By 1980 almost four hundred thousand adolescents were attempting suicide every year. By 1987 suicide had become the second largest killer of teens, after automotive accidents. By the 1990s, suicide had slipped down to number three because young people were killing each other as often as they killed themselves. (Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book that Made your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, 4)

Why point the accusing finger at secularism? Secularism destroys meaning and value. It claims that these do not have any independent existence. Instead, they are merely socially constructed to give life some coherence. However, our welfare depends upon believing that they are real and represent worthwhile pursuits. They impart fullness to our lives.

Secularism provides no basis for hope or faith beyond the physical world of chemical-electrical reactions. Consequently, in a valueless world, there can be no basis for meaning or morality beyond our own arbitrary decisions to create meaning out of non-meaning. Arthur Deikman, a Buddhist-like psychotherapist, writes about the poverty of secular psychotherapy:

·       Human beings need meaning. Without it they suffer boredom, depression, and despair…Western psychotherapy is hard put to meet human beings need for meaning, for it attempts to understand clinical phenomena in a framework based on scientific materialism in which meaning is arbitrary and purpose nonexistent. Consequently, Western psychotherapy interprets the search for meaning as a function of childlike dependency wishes and fears of helplessness. (The Observing Self, 4)

Secularism is incapable of affirming anything beyond the material. Many psychotherapists have noted the relationship between the absence of meaning, purpose, and moral absolutes and depression. In Speaking of Sadness, David Karp writes:

·       Cosmopolitan medicine banishes that [extra-material] knowledge by insisting that suffering is without meaning and unnecessary because pain can be technically eliminated. Symptoms are divorced from the person who has them and the situations that surround them, secularized as mechanical mishaps, and so stripped of their stories, the spiritual ramifications and missing pieces of history that make meaning. (191)

I too had experienced the barrenness of secularism. I had been referred to five highly recommended psychologists in my youth. Each had left me worse off than I had been before. I came to understand that everything that I felt, longed for, and dreamed about was merely a product of my childhood depravations. None of it had any meaning or purpose. It was one big mistake and its victim, a mere result of how I had been treated.

Secular therapy had stripped me of any sense of dignity; it laughed at my quest for honor. It reduced my life to a matter of self-fulfillment but made it almost impossible for me to find fulfillment.

Secularism is suicide, the death of the individual and even of his debauched society.

MORALITY, JUSTICE, MODERN SECULARISM, AND COMPASSION: MY RESPONSE TO AN ATHEIST

It is understandable that you feel uncomfortable with dogmatic and objective forms of morality. These can become imperialistic and pose a threat to the innocent. However, correct objective forms can also promote society as these ideas have promoted the West.

Where would we be without the traditional Western understanding of objective justice! This, however, is now crumbling before a subjective and secular understanding of compassion.

In one such case, a woman was raped by a migrant. However, since she felt sorry for him and had compassion, she refused to bring charges. Consequently, this man is now free to rape others. Compassion? Not really.

Compassion must be guided by wisdom. However, wisdom is now almost dismissed. Why? Because, wisdom recognizes that there are objective principles of morality and justice, and that morality is not just a choice we make but a law to which we must conform.

FRANCOIS HOLLANDE, ISLAM, SECULARISM, AND HOW IT BLINDS

The Daily Mail just revealed that:

·       During his election campaign, [the French Socialist President Francois] Hollande was regularly on the estates, claiming he was at one with poor communities. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3834003/President-Hollande-admitted-France-problem-Islam-warned-country-s-national-symbol-one-day-woman-burka.html#ixzz4Mz20wue0

However, Hollande has evidently changed his mind:

·       Francois Hollande has admitted the country 'has a problem with Islam' and warned France's national symbol will one day by a woman in a burka.

·       The words were all part of a more general attack on people from Muslim backgrounds whom the Socialist Mr Hollande views as a major difficulty for his country.

·       …exposed by authors Gerard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, Le Monde journalists who base their book on 61 interviews carried out with Mr Hollande over the last four years.

·       He reveals that he no longer supports mass immigration, saying 'I think there are too many arrivals,' and says: 'It's true there's a problem with Islam, it's true. It's not in doubt.'

Hadn’t this always been obvious?

1.    Hundreds of Islamic no-go-zones growing across Western Europe

2.    Riots, rapes, and a burgeoning assortment of criminal acts

3.    Explicit Islamic threats to take over

4.    Non-Muslims relegated to a demeaned status in every Islamic nation

5.    The terrifying teachings of the Koran and Hadiths on jihad and world domination

Why hadn’t Hollande and a vast assortment of Western leaders seen this before? The evidence was there. Why didn’t they seriously consult the available evidence? Evidently, they didn’t want to. Why not?

I think that the reason is obvious. Our Western elites have adopted a philosophy or worldview that prevents them from seeing Islam as it really is, as it has always claimed to be. They are wearing a pair of eyeglasses that filters out what they do not want to see, leaving only what agrees with their worldview.

It is a common worldview, albeit naïve. It maintains that if we accept others, they will reciprocate. If we love them, they will just naturally love us back. Love conquers all. It must! If we merely accept all forms of anti-social, immoral behavior, they will naturally disappear on their own. Therefore, we can take down our borders, remove our border guards, and embrace everyone. After all, we are one big human family, aren’t we!

The secularist wants to view himself as a good person, perhaps even a morally superior person. He is therefore above those medieval ideas of crime and punishment. He is, after all, enlightened.

However, reality has a way of stripping us of both our arrogance and perhaps even our upside-down lenses. So check the rubbish heaps for all of those discarded lenses.

MENTAL HEATH AND GROWING SECULARISM

On college campuses, Mental health issues are proliferating according to Dr. Gene Beresin:

·       Dr. Gene Beresin, a psychiatrist and Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says 50% to 60% of college students have a psychiatric disorder.

·       “What I’m including in that is the use of substances, anxiety, depression, problems with relationships, break-ups, academic problems, learning disabilities, attentional problems,” says Dr. Beresin. “If you add them all up 50% doesn’t seem that high.”

·       Dr. Beresin says the suicide rate in college in astronomical. “A college student kills himself every day,” he says. read:students-suicide/

Can we blame stress for this proliferation? Probably not! College campuses have always been a source of stress and competition – nothing new about that.

However, without consulting other studies, there seems to be new or burgeoning factors:

1.    MORAL RELATIVISM: When there is no objective right or wrong, then our feelings necessary fill the gap. Consequently, they assume a greater role.

2.    SEXUAL FREEDOM: The coed no longer has an adequate reason to resist sexual advances. She doesn’t want to be a prude. However, uncommitted sex, rather than liberating, tends towards enslaving to awakened emotional needs.

3.    CHRISTIANITY: As bad as we might feel about ourselves, when we rely upon Jesus, we can endure. However, Christianity has been systematically demeaned at secular college campuses. In place of God, secular counseling tends to turn the counselee inward, suggesting that the answer lies within ourselves. This simply places another burden upon the sufferer. Instead, we need something – Jesus Christ - to counterbalance both self and feelings.