/lit/ - Literature

>>16716025
>atheist countries
So like the USSR? Or would a country with no religion in particular being dominant be considered "atheist?" I picked one of the original sources and it made no attempt at classifying a given country as atheist. It just listed suicide rates by country, so whoever wrote that put their own spin on the data and he would have to clarify how he makes his demarcations.
If you want to demonstrate that atheists are suicidal, it's very lazy to just look at "atheist countries." People killed themselves in the USSR because it was commie. You have to prove that it was in fact the atheism that caused the high suicidality and not just point to a country statistic and find things it correlates with.
As an example of how that can lead you astray, wealthier countries tend to have higher life satisfaction and tend to be less religious. Therefore we could say that less religious countries tend to be more life satisfied on average. Am I allowed to say that the lack of religiosity caused the higher life satisfaction? And even if it did, can I also use this to infer that the less religious a person is, the more life satisfaction they'll have?