everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

Aiza, your research shows one thing. You are trying to make it show another.

No I'm not. I literally just end up stating the exact conclusions of the paper, whereas you seem to try to frantically deny it and make up something like "oh this just shows that religion soothes fear" when fear doesn't play any part in the research at all, and the whole paper was centered on and even outright says that religion promotes self-control.



Given the fact that you've outright resorted to posting straight up opinion pieces from atheists and saying Catholic universities are unreliable, I think you have by far the clearer "agenda" of sorts.

Your claim: Religious people are more self-controlled, careful, thoughtful and high-minded.

You provide no evidence of this.

Yes, yes I did, many many times. Here let me post them AGAIN for you.

>An impression based on a vote-counting method of reviewing studies on religion and personality is that religiosity is associated only with low Psychoticism (or high Agreeableness and Conscientiousness)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...6900002336

First, there is strong evidence for our proposition that religion is positively related to self-control as well as to traits such as Agreeableness and Conscientiousness that are considered by many theorists to be the basic personality substrates of self-control (e.g., Aziz & Rehman, 1996; e.g., Bergin et al., 1987; Desmond et al., 2008; French et al., 2008). There is also substantial evidence that religious parents tend to have children with high self-control (Bartkowski et al., 2008)

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/135/1/69/

"Self-control" is not my words. Its the words of the scientific conclusions drawn from a whole variety of peer-reviewed studies. Conscientiousness is synonymous with being careful.

I'm sure the fact that many relgious people consider suicide an immediate ticket to hell has more to do with it than a perception that there are more reasons for living. Many religious people see suicide as the unforgivable sin, because you are unable to repent for it, being dead and all. That's a huge factor that must be taken in consideration when comparing suicide rates between the religious and non-religious.

Some might, sure. Catholicism, the largest religion, does not though, and its worth noting that depression symptoms in general are higher among irreligious, so its not like religious people are just as depressed but they are less likely to kill themselves:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10480747

Its also noteworthy that religious folk have better social adjustment (more likely to be married, have happier marriages, more supportive friends, more involved with family) and I think a strong social net definitely goes a long way in preventing depression and suicide.