Women who attend religious services at least once a week may have a lower risk of suicide than those who never attend services, according to a study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology, and coauthors analyzed health data from 89,708 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study from 1996 through June 2010. Most of the women were white and Catholic or Protestant.

Compared with women who never attended religious services, women who attended once per week or more had a five times lower risk of committing suicide during the study period, the researchers found.

The authors noted that their study used observational data and did not account for factors such as impulsivity or feelings of hopelessness. In addition, the findings may not be generalizable to other populations.

Suicide is among the 10 leading causes of death in the United States. The major world religions have traditions prohibiting suicide.

“Our results do not imply that health care providers should prescribe attendance at religious services,” they wrote. “However, for patients who are already religious, service attendance might be encouraged as a form of meaningful social participation. Religion and spirituality may be an underappreciated resource that psychiatrists and clinicians could explore with their patients, as appropriate.”

Plan to send 20,000 evangelicals to SE Asia and Mideast creates dilemma for Beijing

At a Sunday service in an underground church in Beijing, worshippers clap their hands and vow to spread their Christian faith in China, and beyond.

“Use me as an instrument, Lord, send me out in the world,” they sing. “I will go make you known. Lord send me.”

A Protestant revival in China has swelled the church’s membership to tens of thousands, and its ambitions are no longer limited to the country

Beijing’s Zion church is one of dozens in the country to have sent missionaries overseas, as evangelical Christians follow their country’s huge infrastructure push into Southeast Asia and the Middle East, creating a dilemma for the officially atheist Communist party.

There are about 1,000 Chinese missionaries outside the country, compared with virtually none a decade ago, according to churches and academics.Church leaders hope to increase their number to 20,000 by the end of the next decade.

Those leaders say missionary activity is a natural extension of China’s Protestant movement, which has grown rapidly in recent decades and now numbers about 100m.

“When a country develops religion to a certain level it will engage in missionary activity. This is very normal,” says Cui Qian, pastor of the Wanbang Missionary Church in Shanghai.

Mr Cui’s church has 20 missionaries overseas, mostly in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. They work as Chinese teachers or at state-owned enterprises, and learn local languages, says the pastor, who recently visited a missionary couple in Lebanon.

Nearly all Chinese missionaries are from “underground” churches independent of China’s state-controlled Protestant association, which for decades have been subject to Communist party crackdowns.

That experience makes them ideal for low-profile activities in countries including North Korea, Mr Cui says. “It’s Chinese-style missionary work. We don’t build churches and we don’t need much organizational structure. We survived the Cultural Revolution. So we have experience”.
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Chinese churches’ most ambitious plan is “Mission China 2030”, which aims to send 20,000 faithful overseas by the end of next decade. The number, calculated in part on an estimate of the number of foreign missionaries who died in China, was affirmed at a meeting of 1,000 Chinese church representatives in South Korea last summer.

Christianity is spreading in North Korea as fewer citizens in the hermit state consider dictator Kim Jong-Un a god, the Telegraph has learned from an anonymous defector.
Using figures found in the latest International Religious Freedom Report authored by the U.S. State Department, Breitbart News has determined that the Christian population in North Korea has increased dramatically—at least five-fold—from about 37,000 known practicing Christians in 2012 to between 200,000 and 400,000 now.

The State Department, which gleaned the Christian population figures from data maintained by the United Nations and the Cornerstone Ministries International (CMI), acknowledged the number of Christians in North Korea may be higher.

State learned from CMI that an estimated “10-45 percent” of people imprisoned in North Koreans detention camps are Christians.

“An estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in the political prison camp system in remote areas under horrific conditions,” points out State in its report. “CSW [Christian Solidarity Worldwide] said a policy of guilt by association was often applied in cases of detentions of Christians, meaning that the relatives of Christians were also detained regardless of their beliefs.”

An unnamed North Korean defector confirmed the significant increase in North Korea’s Christian population.

“In the past, the people were told to worship the Kim family as their god, but many North Koreans no longer respect Kim Jong-Un”, the defector, now a member of the Seoul-based Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, told the Telegraph. “That means they are looking for something else to sustain their faith.”

“In some places, that has led to the emergence of shamans, but the Christian church is also growing and deepening its roots there”, he also said, adding, “Even though people know they could be sent to prison—or worse—they are still choosing to worship, and that means that more cracks are appearing in the regime and the system.”

North Koreans who practice any form of religion can face jail, torture, or even execution in the communist country, reveals the International Religious Freedom Report for 2016.

“The government continued to deal harshly with those who engaged in almost any religious practices through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests,” stresses the report.

Citing a 2014 report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Human Rights Situation of North Korea, State reports that the communist country considers Christianity a serious threat.

Christianity “challenged the official cult of personality and provided a platform for social and political organization and interaction outside of the government,” notes State. “The report concluded Christians faced persecution, violence, and heavy punishment if they practiced their religion outside the state-controlled churches.”

Although the North Korean constitution provides protection for the right to freedom of religious beliefs, the communist nation denies its people the right to freedom of thought and religion.

In North Korea, “there was an almost complete denial by the government of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and, in many instances, violations of human rights committed by the government constituted crimes against humanity,” notes the State report, which covers about 200 foreign jurisdictions, criticizing American allies and foes alike for their religious freedoms shortcomings.

CBS News reported earlier this week that Iceland is leading the world in “eradicating Down syndrome births.” One might be forgiven for assuming that Iceland has developed an innovative treatment for the chromosomal disorder. It turns out Iceland’s solution is much simpler, and much more sinister: using prenatal testing and abortion to systematically exterminate children with Down syndrome. This isn’t progress; it’s eugenics.

Prenatal testing is optional in Iceland, but the government mandates that doctors notify women of that option. About 85 percent of expectant mothers undergo the test, and close to 100 percent of those women choose to abort if their child is diagnosed with Down syndrome. Just two children with Down syndrome are born in Iceland each year, often as the result of faulty testing.

The CBS article does little to accord this subject the moral gravity it deserves. “Other countries aren’t lagging too far behind in Down syndrome termination rates,” the authors note casually. CBS News’s tweet promoting the story read simply: “Iceland is on pace to virtually eliminate Down syndrome through abortion.”

But Iceland isn’t “eliminating Down syndrome” at all. It’s eliminating people. The callous tone of the piece makes selective abortion sound like a technological innovation rather than what it really is: the intentional targeting of “unfit” persons for total elimination.

What kind of culture does it require to foster such a mindset, to foster a society in which nearly every mother of a Down-syndrome child chooses to abort? Iceland is at the high end of the spectrum in this regard — and was one of the first countries to normalize widespread prenatal testing, in an effort to identify fetal abnormalities and eliminate them through abortion — but it is far from alone.

Ninety percent of women in the United Kingdom who receive a positive Down-syndrome diagnosis choose to abort. In the U.S., that percentage falls somewhere between 67 and 90, according to a recent meta-study of Down-syndrome termination rates over the last few decades. In Europe as a whole, somewhere around 92 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. This targeting of individuals with Down syndrome is borne out not just in astronomical abortion rates, but in a cultural attitude that often regards them as less than human.

In France, for example, the State Council banned from the airwaves a video featuring children with Down syndrome talking about their happy lives. The advertisement was meant to comfort mothers who received a prenatal diagnosis and assure them that their children would have beautiful, largely normal lives. The ad was forbidden by the French government because the smiles of the children would “disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices” — in other words, because seeing them happy would upset women who had aborted their Down syndrome children.

Meanwhile, prenatal testing is praised nearly universally for its ability to give women a full array of “options” for their pregnancies, but many women report feeling pressured by their doctors — whether to be tested in the first place or to choose abortion if the test reveals Down syndrome or other abnormalities. It is taken for granted in the medical community that no woman would carry a Down-syndrome pregnancy to term.

This pressure reveals the pervasive belief that selective abortion is somehow an actual health-care solution. Instead of seeking real treatment for the ailments that plague people with Down syndrome, or even finding potential cures, we have settled for a false vision of progress that kills people with a disorder rather than treating them.

A counselor at an Iceland hospital sees the issue even more starkly. “We don’t look at abortion as a murder,” she said. “We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication . . . preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder — that’s so black and white. Life isn’t black and white. Life is grey.”

It is in this supposed gray area that the desire to promote health and well-being morphs into the insidious view that people with Down syndrome are better off dead — and that we will be a more advanced society for having relieved them of the burden of a “limited” life. Too many people today believe it is preferable, and indeed more humane, to murder children rather than allow them to suffer. But what life doesn’t have suffering?

Jerome Lejeune, the French geneticist who discovered the chromosomal basis for Down syndrome, once offered this perspective: “It cannot be denied that the price of these diseases is high — in suffering for the individual and in burdens for society. Not to mention what parents suffer! But we can assign a value to that price: It is precisely what a society must pay to remain fully human.”

The title of the CBS piece asks, “What kind of society do you want to live in?” The article’s implicit response seems to be, “One dedicated to eliminating abnormality and suffering by any means necessary.” But no admirable society eradicates suffering by eradicating those who suffer. To achieve true moral progress, we must reject the killing of the vulnerable and condemn any backwards society that promotes such a regime as a solution.

. They are helped by the belief that God loves them. It's just self-hypnosis

I’ll argue that the error of your morality and ethics argument is that morality and ethics are always driven by economics and game theory, not vice versa. Religion works because it encodes game theory and economics, not because of some cardinal virtue of (non-relativistic) absolute truth.
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There is no such thing as absolute truth or absolutely true ethics, because our Universe is necessarily and definitionally unbounded entropic relativistic
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A particular orthodoxy works at a particular epoch because of the game theory and economics of that epoch.
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More bluntly, humans defect or cooperate according to the Nash equilibrium of the system in play.
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The economically relevant players have a risk due to unfair play. Think about in terms of a Nash equilibrium or Prisoner’s dilemma. When players know the possible outcomes and strategies, the equilibrium is more performant.
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Problem with the “don’t drink goats milk on Thursdays” and “universe loves you if you love the universe” sort of religious mind control, is it just doesn’t work well any more, because humans have access to information and so they can’t be fooled so easily
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Meta physics will always exist because I’ve explained elsewhere that our existence must necessarily be composed on unbounded unknowns (i.e. uncertainty aka entropy) else we do not exist other than as some preordained static game where all the outcomes were known at the birth of the universe. The static universe is impossible because it would necessitate that something exists (mathematically) “outside” the bound, but then by definition that is unbounded.
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Commensurately there’s no absolute truth of philosophical arguments such as this one, as they’re relativistic like everything else. There isn’t a winner. Contention in philosophy is part of our existence. It’s disingenuous however to not cite the opposing argument.

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge.

They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent.

The offer is:
If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get

In economics and game theory, a participant is considered to have superrationality (or renormalized rationality) if they have perfect rationality (and thus maximize their own utility) but assume that all other players are superrational too and that a superrational individual will always come up with the same strategy as any other superrational thinker when facing the same symmetrical problem. Applying this definition, a superrational player playing against a superrational opponent in a prisoner's dilemma will cooperate while a rationally self-interested player would defect.
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Superrationality is a form of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.
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Superrationality is an alternative method of reasoning. First, it is assumed that the answer to a symmetric problem will be the same for all the superrational players. Thus the sameness is taken into account before knowing what the strategy will be.
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(In the prisoners dilemma) two superrational players will both cooperate, since this answer maximizes their payoff.
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Note that a superrational player playing against a game-theoretic rational player will defect, since the strategy only assumes that superrational players will agree.

The existence of God is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of the universe. The existence of the universe is sufficient proof of the existence of God.
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God is a unity. He is a single, whole, complete indivisible entity. He cannot be divided into parts or described by attributes. Any attempt to ascribe attributes to God is merely man's imperfect attempt to understand the infinite.
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God transcends time. He has no beginning and no end.

The pervasive nihilism of modernity serves to block any move away from the prevalent insanity and despair; because our problems are at the level of basic (metaphysical) assumptions, yet any attempt to discover, examine and revise these assumptions is shipwrecked instantly by nihilism.

Nihilism therefore functions as the conservatism of radical inversion - it serves to conserve the metaphysical assumptions that underpin secular leftism.

Nihilism, by this meaning, is disbelief in reality; it is the feeling (rather than the conviction) that nothing is really-real, that everything is uncertain - that anything may be wrong.

The modern world view is based on the objectivity of perceptions (eg. in science) - yet we also know that perceptions are often wrong (seeing is not believing). Modern morality is based on the primacy of feelings - modern ethics are all versions of utilitarianism, that is of good being happiness and evil being suffering - yet we know that feelings are temporary, reversible, influenced by psychology, illness, drugs and propaganda.

In sum, in a world built on perceptions and feelings - we know that neither are reliable, nor solid, nor even known for sure. Hence the nihilism.

Modern nihilism is indeed a feeling, rather than a thought - because (pretty obviously) one cannot have a conviction that 'nihilism is true', because that is self-refuting; rather the strength and intractability of nihilism comes from its being a feeling we can't shake-off, rather than a proposition that we are logically-compelled to acknowledge.

Consequently, modern people are stuck in a situation in which their nihilism ruins their lives, but in which they do not take their nihilism seriously - because if they did they would behave very differently. They would not argue-in-favour of nihilism, they would not use nihilism as any kind of argument - they would not even attempt to communicate, they would not plan, they would not do anything which interfered with their current selfish gratification... and so on.

What happens is that people have a feeling of nihilism, which is unpleasant and usually takes the form of fear. So they address the situation at the level of feelings by some combination of displacing nihilism with other feelings and obliterating the feeling of nihilism.

For example by distracting with the mass media, by distracting with the pursuit of sex or status; or obliteration by intoxication with drugs or sleep or immersive media - and all the other characteristically modern evasions.

That modern nihilism is a matter of feeling rather than thinking is in fact a potential solution to the problem. If we take nihilism seriously, and seriously think about it - and keep thinking about it, we will be forced to make a decision between:

1. Accepting the truth of nihilism, and behaving accordingly.

2. Discovering that nihilism is not the bottom line of our conviction.

Of course, this is a dangerous tactic, since accepting the truth of nihilism may lead to suicide or a short-fast-track to death by short-term-self-indulgence (including harming or killing others, when doing so happens to gratify an individual).

But - given the rarity of consistent nihilism, it is likely that most people would recognise that their deepest and most pervasive feeling is not nihilism, but something opposed to nihilism.

In sum, individuals may discover their own bedrock convictions - their personal certainties, stronger than nihilism, upon which they can begin to build meaning purpose and genuine relationships.

Dangerous though it is; taking nihilism seriously, and rigorously thinking-it-though for ourselves, is probably the only way out from its trap.

It was for me.