Four kids & mom of Catholic family die in a house fire.

[Jehanne]

I deplore the loss of life in that tragedy, and I am not ridiculing them; rather, I am ridiculing their moronic beliefs.  And, yes, I think that religious faith does correlate with overall levels of stupidity.

You've yet to show that their faith is a cause in their deaths; indeed, you've acknowledged that you'll have to await reports from the investigation simply to see if your premise holds water ... yet here you are, quadrupling down.

Religious faith often warrants ridicule, but using a tragedy like this as a springboard indicates to me an essential absence of empathy in you. Change "Catholic" to "atheist", and insert yourself as the surviving father. How would you feel reading a similar thread on a Christian forum?

It's correlation versus causation, yes, but as we all know, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".  The first inferences that the association between moderate to heavy smoking and lung cancer was anecdotal.  Early surgeons who were performing autopsies on patients who were heavy smokers noticed deposits of thick, black tar on their lungs, and began speaking and publishing those results.  Later on retrospective studies began to be published, looking at past behavior, and finally, prospective studies, which were longitudinal that followed a randomly selected sample of persons from the present into the future.  In spite of all the thousands of studies, R.A. Fisher, perhaps the greatest statistician of all time, publicly rejected the claims that the association between smoking and lung cancer was causal.  Finally, the Academy started doing double-blinded, placebo-controlled randomized studies using animal models, such as mice and other rodents, and from that, the causal link was demonstrated, empirically.  In the mid-1960s, the United States Surgeon General settled the matter, forever -- smoking tobacco, to any degree, increases one's risk of lung cancer!

Now, CL and others, will saw that one's religious faith, no matter how wacky, is orthogonal to living or dying.  It may be impossible to prove such an association empirically, but correlational studies abound that show that less-educated (hence, more religious) persons are more likely to die than more educated (hence, less religious) persons.  As for the family, in question, I admit that I do not know, but from what I have read, they appear to be traditional, conservative Catholics who are on the right-wing of the political spectrum, the type who supported Ron Paul (and, now, his son), the type that eschews and shuns government regulation and involvement in the lives of the citizenry.

But, yes, be sure that I will be following up on this one and have bookmarked this post for future reference!  If I am wrong in my hunches, then I will apologize to the board, publicly!  But, I suspect that the home did not have any fire alarms and/or fire extinguishers, and if so, such was due to the ignorance (and arrogance) of the parents, and yes, I lay that firmly at the feet of organized religion.  No apologies whatsoever for that!

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I'm guessing that Catholics were simply the target of opportunity in this case.

Yep, I'm thinking you can safely assume your guess is right.

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I'm not offering any new insights here, but the gist of the story was them being rather poor. Which is totally unrelated to their faith and has everything to do with them needing a wood stove to heat their house and not being able to afford any smoke detectors or other fire precautions.

The whole thing is on the same lines as some moron asking me in a very hot summer with many heat casualties among the elderly, why they hadn't got air conditioning. Uhm, maybe because stuff like that costs money?

I know. This thread deeply disturbed me in the way it has been carried out and discussed by jehanne. That twisted line of thinking that jehanne has is just FUBAR.

Hey, I am not "targeting" anybody.  It was the free press that reported that they were Catholic.

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Oh I agree with you, but since Jehanne was on a Catholic bashing spree, I thought it rather fit the question you posed.

I'm not offering any new insights here, but the gist of the story was them being rather poor. Which is totally unrelated to their faith and has everything to do with them needing a wood stove to heat their house and not being able to afford any smoke detectors or other fire precautions.

The whole thing is on the same lines as some moron asking me in a very hot summer with many heat casualties among the elderly, why they hadn't got air conditioning. Uhm, maybe because stuff like that costs money?

Well, maybe five kids is too many, then?  I remember reading a bumper sticker where I live, "Can't feed them?  Don't breed them!"

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Religion is a sickness, Catholicism in particular.  I have more respect for a typical drug user; at least they admit that theirs is a chemical fantasy as opposed to an intellectual one.

Personally I find bigotry and the need to persecute a group of people you don't know as being all the same and deserving of your mistreatment to be a sickness and reprehensible.  I condemn it.

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And, as we all know, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to believe in dumb religious ideas: that every issue is black, white and simple.

Fixed that for you.  Care to parade out your outstanding educational credentials which have led you to shit post this way?

I am not persecuting anybody.  As for my educational credentials, I have a Master's degree.

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You've yet to show that their faith is a cause in their deaths; indeed, you've acknowledged that you'll have to await reports from the investigation simply to see if your premise holds water ... yet here you are, quadrupling down.

Religious faith often warrants ridicule, but using a tragedy like this as a springboard indicates to me an essential absence of empathy in you. Change "Catholic" to "atheist", and insert yourself as the surviving father. How would you feel reading a similar thread on a Christian Catholic forum?

ftfy.

nifty.

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ftfy.

Nah, not really. The principle is attaching any faith to this tragedy is wrong. Hell, it could be a Ford Mustang forum, and it would still be horseshit. Where the shitty thinking is expressed doesn't change the fact that it's shitty "thinking".

Yeah, I do think that faith does lead to tragedies, like people flying airplanes into buildings.  I really have had enough of postmodern bullshit, haven't you?

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You've yet to show that their faith is a cause in their deaths; indeed, you've acknowledged that you'll have to await reports from the investigation simply to see if your premise holds water ... yet here you are, quadrupling down.

Religious faith often warrants ridicule, but using a tragedy like this as a springboard indicates to me an essential absence of empathy in you. Change "Catholic" to "atheist", and insert yourself as the surviving father. How would you feel reading a similar thread on a Christian forum?

Yeah...using a tragedy as an opportunity to ridicule an utterly unrelated facet of the victim's character or beliefs reflects more on the one doing the ridiculing.  Imagine if there was a terrible car accident that killed a pedestrian bystander...then Jehanne says something like "The pedestrian was a Trump supporter and supporting Trump is moronic."

If it was a Trump supporter, I would probably say that!  I have seen enough white trash idiots were I live driving their big trucks at high speed down 100% snow & ice covered roads, and yes, a lot of them are Trump supporters!