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Offline Joe  
#1 Posted : Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:25:10 AM(UTC)
Joe
Joined: 6/30/2007(UTC)
Posts: 16
Location: Virginia

Below is a spam / chain letter that members of my Catholic family were forwarding around the world and to other members of the family.

I was trying to show, in a sarcastic/humorous way, how using information without context is idiotic.
Then, in the last part of my response, I included a little teaser about Yahweh wanting a relationship rather than worship.
The hope was that some would at some point look into Scripture and find/confirm this evidence for themselves.

Original Message:
Subject: How to Stay Safe
=================

How to stay safe in the world today.

1. Avoid riding in automobiles because they are responsible for 20% of all fatal accidents.
2. Do not stay home because 17% of all accidents occur in the home.
3. Avoid walking on streets or sidewalks because 14% of all accidents occur to pedestrians.
4. Avoid traveling by air, rail, or water because 16% of all accidents involve these forms of transportation.
5. Of the remaining 33%, 32% of all deaths occur in hospitals.

Above all else, avoid hospitals.

You will be pleased to learn that only .001% of all deaths occur in worship services in church, and these are usually related to previous physical disorders.

Therefore, logic tells us that the safest place for you to be at any given point in time is at church!

Bible study is safe too.
The percentage of deaths during Bible study is even less.



My Response


If that 0.001% figure is correct,
and a weekly religious service is about 1 hour of the 168 that occur each week,
and polls of US citizens reveal that between 35% and 44% of Americans claim they attend church regularly,
and over half of those who consider themselves regular churchgoers estimate that they miss 5-15 services a year,
and adjust for an obvious propensity for people to overinflate their "goodness" self-rating,
which can be estimated based upon how 17% of Americans claim to give 10-13% of their income to their church, when actual financial figures show less than 3% actually do,
it can then be estimated that people in the US spend anywhere between 0.00028% and 0.00043% of their time attending "worship services in church."

So, if 0.001% of deaths occur during these events, that means that you are somewhere around 2.3- to 3.5-times more likely to die in church in the US than you are doing other activities as a whole.

Now, factor in that regular church attendance in other nations around the world, include figures like 10-26% for England, 1-3% for Russia, and 9-16% for Australia (Ireland is of course around 74-84%.).
The weighted average for the world is approximately 18-26%.
Making an average Christian churchgoer in the world 3.9- to 6.9-times more likely to die during a service than any other time during their week.

And of course, considering that terrorism attacks go up 20-25% during Ramadan,
and hospital ERs in areas like the Palestinian sections of Israel frequently get as many or more cases in the 12 hours immediately after Friday Jum'ah (Islamic main prayer assembly) as they get the rest of the week combined;
you are statistically somewhere as low as 4.7-times and possibly over 82-times more likely to die during religious gatherings in Islamic-centric portions of the world.

Maybe God isn't constantly telling people to stop bowing down and/or worshipping Him throughout His Scriptures because He wants to have a relationship with us.
Maybe he's just trying to keep us safe!
Offline bitnet  
#2 Posted : Tuesday, September 30, 2008 5:39:09 PM(UTC)
bitnet
Joined: 7/3/2007(UTC)
Posts: 1,120

Shalom,

And do not forget... how do people get to these churches if not in cars or by walking next to roads with traffic? That raises the stakes a little more...
The reverence of Yahweh is the beginning of Wisdom.
Offline Heretic Steve  
#3 Posted : Monday, October 27, 2008 2:20:48 PM(UTC)
Heretic Steve
Joined: 9/26/2007(UTC)
Posts: 258
Location: ohio

I get the impression that just being born significantly increases the odds of death.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
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