Census 2022: 10% reduction in Roman Catholic numbers

There are indeed many right and wrong ways to conduct studies for sure. And I have seen so SO many done wrong over the years that I remain skeptical of any claims made without a citation. And even more so when.... having asked directly for citations.... the other person has continued to not provide any.

So if a claim is to be made by someone that religious people tend to live longer.... I would need to see which studies they particularly think they are referring to.... so I can check for myself what those studies ACTUALLY say. Otherwise the old adage applies of "That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence".

So by all means, cite your source(s) here.

Once again you play the man and not the ball, why do differing opinions antagonise you so?

Yes I do have kids in school and yes there were problems with one teacher in particular who made nasty comments to my elder child for being opted out.

Congratulations on your being able to raise your children as you see fit without interference, all I ask is the same right. But you seem to think you know the realities of other people's lives when you don't have a breeze.

Absolutely. Religion has no place in education. I'd go so far as to say that faith is the opposite of education. Parents would still be free to indoctrinate their child into whatever nonsense they like at home or through Sunday Schools or the like. The classroom hours currently wasted on Religion could be better spent on any number of different subjects.

I'm curious as to what you see as the benefit of "competition between schools" by having them run by different bodies? A more centralised approach to education should lead to massive cost savings (economies of scale on procurement, standardised management systems etc.) freeing up budget to hire more teachers, more SNAs, invest in technology and equipment etc.

All children deserve the highest standard of education the state can provide. The only argument I can see for non standardised schools is a desire for one's own children to attend the "better" school. Even in a perfectly homogenous education system, those with the means and/or desire to boost their children's learning opportunities would still be able to pay for grinds, exam prep courses outside of the official curriculum so parental choice would still be there.

Schrodingers immigrant again I see. Not only is he sponging off the system while taking our jobs, he's both propping up the RCC every Sunday and boosting the non-religious numbers 🤣

Seriously though the natural population increase should be leading to more catholics not fewer. It's clear that just as they have drifted away from church marriages, more and more parents are not bringing their kids up in the religion they themselves were brought up in.

Apologies, I didn't actually read the second half of your post (where you asked for citations.)

This Harvard longitudinal studio was referenced a lot

This Ohio State University study took a different approach by looking at obituaries

Does Religion Stave Off the Grave? Religious Affiliation in One’s Obituary and Longevity - Laura E. Wallace, Rebecca Anthony, Christian M. End, Baldwin M. Way, 2019 (sagepub.com)

Its over once this nonsense is gone out of schools. End the catholic patronage of schools and it'll be gone overnight. My kids aren't baptized, won't make the sacraments and I don't want them in any religion classes. The bouncy castle catholics need to find some other way to show off their kids and money.

Would parents please wake up this and stop massaging their numbers, its 2023 the church serves no purpose anymore.

It's amazing how many people fail to understand the concept of a percentage point.

Every school indoctrinated.

With religious schhols you have a fairly good idea what the doctrine is.

In secular ones, it's often less clear. Some people assume humanism, but it's by no means guaranteed.

Many Catholics are humanism, like john Paul 2. Humanism is not atheism or secularism. It is just a human centric view, which is kinda of fading now by posthumanism. There is nothing wrong with doctrine or indoctrination. We rely on it all the time.

No, there's not.

It's just another ism.

Both studies here, the second link for absolute sure though, prove quite well the point I was making. So it is a good one for you to have cited them here. Such reports do absolutely nothing to establish, in even the smallest way, any kind of ACTUAL link between religiosity and longevity. It is all correlation and nothing more.

Firstly, as the link notes, previous studies relied on "self reporting" which is not the highest standard in science. THIS report however manages to go one level worse than that. Which is that they looked for mentions of religiosity in obituaries. Two obvious problems should be very much obvious here. The first is that this is not EVEN "self reporting" but second hand self reporting of third parties after the fact. The second is that obituaries tend to be short and are not going to be good sources of actual information about a person. It is not clear to me why anyone would want to do a study where they intentionally go from one of the lowest forms of data collation and go "Lets see if we can find an even WORSE data source and run with that instead shall we???".

A third glaring problem is that there is no useful comparison here. If we truly wanted a good comparison of religious longevity versus lower religious longevity we would need to do it between countries and distinct areas. Doing it within smaller geographic areas gives less sound data. For example is the correlation of lower longevity related to their not being religious specifically, or their not being religious in a very religious area and thus being the "other" and the "outsider" for that reason? The study itself even notes this saying the effect of being non religious in areas of higher religiousity, skews the correlation!!!! That is a massively important piece of text in your link here!

However as I said in my previous post and have already said in this post, nothing about this study shows ANY link other than the merest of correlations between religiousity and longevity. It even notes itself that "Additionally, social integration and volunteerism partially mediated the religion–longevity relation." Which is something many of us would suspect anyway. Which is that it is not religion or religiosity in itself that is doing anything for longevity but in fact ANY kind of stable social interaction and integration. Something you can get anywhere, not just from religion. I have long suspected we have a lonliness and isolation crisis in modern society. Any study trying to link religiousity to longevity needs to account for that before it can be taken seriously, or as useful.

But again the original point I made in a previous posts stands here. If you establish nothing but a correlation between religion and longevity you can miss MANY of the possible/likely CAUSAL factors that can explain such things. For example if there is a tendency in older people to be religious, then that will automatically skew correlation figures to look like religious people tend to live longer. If being ACTIVELY religious (attendence and participation for example) is more the purview of those who have the time and health and resources to do so.... then they are already going to be people who live longer due to the health and stress benefits of their privilege. That skews correlations too. The list goes on. (As do I hehehe).

Thankfully the authors of the study were honest about much of this. I will give them that kudos at least! They note " First, our data are correlational in nature and only collected at one time point. As such, it is impossible to disentangle the direction of the effect: whether religious involvement increases longevity or healthier people tend to be more religious." and they note things that can negatively bias interpretation of that correlation that even I have to admit I did not think of. And they also honestly note how bad the data source of obituaries is. Double kudos here!

So yes your citations here really do very little to support the premise that religiousity leads to longevity! But your citation IS very good at explaining the points I was trying to make, even better than I was. So I strongly recommend it as an education tool here. Go into your own link there, scroll down to the sections titled "Limitations" and read it closely. It will tell you a LOT quite clearly. Things I have, over my years on this forum, tried myself to explain to people. I will be holding on to this link as an education tool on how NOT to interpret bad data, and make correlation errors. I thank you honestly for this one, as I had not seen it before. And I am genuine in that thanks, not just being snide in a "Gotcha" way.

You appear to be picking holes in an argument that I never made. I said that religous people tend to live longer. The wording of that statement was intentionally phrased. I didn't make any claims about the root cause of it - after all it was an aside in a response about something else entirely.

The studies I supplied were supporting what I said....not what you seem to think I said.

You can spare me the explainer on how increased ice cream sales don't actually cause increased numbers of drownings.

I think you mean many Catholics aren’t real Catholics.

None of the things you mention are necessary components of a way of life thar is based in a shared set of values and beliefs.

Well, having 1 or 2 kids isnt moderate either. It is an extreme situation brought on by very new ways of living.