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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php? ... geId=81459 (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=81459)

QuoteDad links son's suicide to 'The God Delusion'
Says atheism-promoting book hidden under mattress, last page bookmarked
A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college
, to the anti-Christian book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

"Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but other students and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn't like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design," the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse.

"This professor either assigned him to read or challenged him to read a book, 'The God Delusion,' by Richard Dawkins," he said.

Jesse Kilgore committed suicide in October by walking into the woods near his New York home and shooting himself. Keith Kilgore said he was shocked because he believed his son was grounded in Christianity, had blogged against abortion and for family values, and boasted he'd been debating for years.

My comments (re-posted from Atheist Think Tank (http://www.atheistthinktank.net/thinktank/index.php?topic=6051.msg122130#msg122130) ):

This dad is just looking for something or someone to blame for the tragic death of his son.

I do not know what situation would lead to a professor deciding to recommend The God Delusion to a biology student.  Blind Watchmaker would had been a more related book to recommend to a student who was discussing intelligent design with the professor.  Since this was in a college setting, I do not think it was inappropriate to recommend a book.  I have had books recommended to me by my own professors in the past...Ishmael was a required reading in my environmental ethics course and the professor suggested that we read the rest of the series.  For those of you who have read the books, you know they could destroy someone's religious faith too.

I also do not know how someone who read The God Delusion could walk away from it thinking their life was pointless.  Dawkins has a very positive view of the wonders of a world without god colored glasses.  In my opinion, that positive outlook was reflected in the book.

To me, it is very obvious that this kid already had emotional problems prior to reading the book.  The reason I think this is because anyone who spent a lot of time debating their religious beliefs should already be more than familiar with the basic arguments and points made in The God Delusion.  Anyone who boasts about debating but very obviously was not actually debating (I think we all know that type) must have a problem they are either trying to hide from others or themselves.

It is very unfortunate that a young, and apparently smart, man met his end in such a saddening manner.  But, don't blame it on the book, don't blame it on an open educational system, pull yourself together and don't blame anyone.    This was no child, he was an adult and adults have to face challenges to their beliefs in the real world.  Suicide rarely makes any logical sense to those other than the person who attempted or did commit suicide.  Suicidal people are not logical.

(Honestly, I'd be more likely to consider his military training and experience as a factor.  The training they go through makes other people "targets" and "kills" thus allowing a person to dehumanize others.  For someone that is in a poor emotional state, I don't think it is a far stretch to say they were able to dehumanize themselves.  To be clear, I'm not saying that all military people are suicidal or would become suicidal; just that it could be a much more obvious factor than some book.)

The father clearly has not dead TGD, and is assuming it's message is nihilist.

At least atheists read the Bible and study religion before blaming it for some of the world's problems.

yup, the dad is looking for a scapegoat for his son's suicide and atheism is a natural enemy these days.  We can get blamed for all types of things and all you'll see is nodding heads all around.

If that book pushed him over the edge, he had more problems than a crisis of faith, that's for sure.  I'm so sorry that the family lost such a good mind and a son, but that book is not to blame.

Of course, that won't stop the dad from suing the university, the teacher and the library, as well as Dawkins I'm sure.  And everyone will settle, give him some money to go away, thus making it a payable issue.  Ugh.

I read a few more articles on that site, like one about teachers and parents being upset that the school was handing out flyers to Camp Quest.  OMG, how HORRIBLE that they're advertising a camp where kids can THINK for themselves and explore science issues!!!!  How DARE they tell my child he can think for himself and not live and breathe the brainwashing religious crap!   :brick:  :crazy:  

Depression is a precursor to suicide (aside from psychotic episodes and such) - it is most likely that the guy had problems long before picking up Dawkins' book but either hid it well or no one paid attention.  Blaming the book is a cop out and seems to be the desperate attempt of a grief stricken father.

It's always easier to blame others.

this is so sad and frustrating.  maybe if the guy had felt he could go to his family or friends and discuss his feelings and doubts, this would never have happened.  i bet he felt he'd be alienated if he tried to talk about it.  it's really unfortunate that he had to feel so alone.

I don't understand why his father is grief-stricken. Apparently his son is now in heaven in eternal bliss. Shouldn't he be happy that his son is now in a better place?

 

I, too, think this is a very sad situation. I think the military mat well be to blame though.

I can see that the lad may have had a hard time in college too. Academics who have spent a long time studying biology and who understand the evidence for evolution are hardly going to make  it easy for a student to stick with Intelligent Design. Fellow students, too, are likely to be unimpressed with non-evolutionary views bearing in mind one has to learn and be examined in evolution not ID.

I suspect the problems carried over form the military, maybe PTSD, as well as alienation due to ID maybe what led up to the suicide but we can't blame Dawkins or the college lecturer for that - blame might be better focused on the availability of the gun.

That is bullsh*t. If he took the time to read the book, he would see how idiotic it is to blame it for his son's death. I have read the book twice now, and it makes want to make the most of this life because you don't get another. It makes me want to help others, help spread reason and logic, and overall be a better person for the good of mankind.

I hate people who will use a tragic event to promote their religious agenda.

Quote from: "karadan"I don't understand why his father is grief-stricken. Apparently his son is now in heaven in eternal bliss. Shouldn't he be happy that his son is now in a better place?

 

yyyeah but you know, no matter what a good person you are, if you kill yourself... you know...
you burn in hell
forever

Quote from: "MariaEvri"

Quote from: "karadan"I don't understand why his father is grief-stricken. Apparently his son is now in heaven in eternal bliss. Shouldn't he be happy that his son is now in a better place?

 

yyyeah but you know, no matter what a good person you are, if you kill yourself... you know...
you burn in hell
forever

Oooh, yeah, i forgot about that.

I guess he has every right to be devestated then. His son, being ripped apart by demons for all eternity. His entrails being used to dress the vile fetid bodies of psychotically deranged cohorts of the devil. His eyes being boiled in vats of acid and his teeth being smashed out by fiery mallets....

Either that, or his son has no idea of all of this because he is nothingness floating in a sea of oblivion - unaware of anything because his consciousness no longer exists.

I wonder which of the above would cause his father more torment. I wonder if his father thinks any less of his beloved religion now.

Probably not...

What a ridiculous situation.

no, you have it all wrong. Dad or son, they are no Muslims so they will be made to sit in boiling water and be made to drink boiling water for all eternity.

The only thing is - how does any of it hurt if you are a non-material spirit? I don't get that bit!

Quote from: "wheels5894"no, you have it all wrong. Dad or son, they are no Muslims so they will be made to sit in boiling water and be made to drink boiling water for all eternity.

The only thing is - how does any of it hurt if you are a non-material spirit? I don't get that bit!

I stand corrected

Quote from: "wheels5894"no, you have it all wrong. Dad or son, they are no Muslims so they will be made to sit in boiling water and be made to drink boiling water for all eternity.

The only thing is - how does any of it hurt if you are a non-material spirit? I don't get that bit!

That's because pain in a 4th dimension cannot be adequately explained in 3 dimensional terms, but it's bad.    Exchange 'hot bacon grease' for 'water' and you will get a better idea.  Or better yet, try 'stagnant YMCA hot tub water'.

Suicide is generally inexplicable.  Really, it's just what happens when a person's ability to cope is outweighed by the pain (emotional, physical, etc.) he is experiencing.  I suspect PTSD from his war experience to be a strong contributing factor.

I suffer from PTSD and sometimes, my trauma has caused me to have some highly illogical emotions.  I've contemplated suicide quite a number of times.  Oddly enough, I never contemplated suicide while I was on the street or in the midst of that personal war.  When I was in survival mode, I was incredibly, unshakably practical.  However, once I got back to physical safety and comfort my traumas surfaced, still surface.  Once you stop thinking about how you are going to survive from minute to minute all the shit you've experienced comes crashing down on you.

I feel empathy for the poor kid's suffering.  With a fundie family he stood little chance of getting support for emotional trauma or mental illness brought on by his wartime experiences.  Without a real outlet, the young man probably suffered horribly, steeping in a pressure cooker of inescapable emotional hell.  

I don't really believe anyone can come back from a war without suffering mental or emotional harm of some kind.

Quote from: "Kylyssa"Suicide is generally inexplicable.  Really, it's just what happens when a person's ability to cope is outweighed by the pain (emotional, physical, etc.) he is experiencing.  I suspect PTSD from his war experience to be a strong contributing factor.

I suffer from PTSD and sometimes, my trauma has caused me to have some highly illogical emotions.  I've contemplated suicide quite a number of times.  Oddly enough, I never contemplated suicide while I was on the street or in the midst of that personal war.  When I was in survival mode, I was incredibly, unshakably practical.  However, once I got back to physical safety and comfort my traumas surfaced, still surface.  Once you stop thinking about how you are going to survive from minute to minute all the shit you've experienced comes crashing down on you.

I feel empathy for the poor kid's suffering.  With a fundie family he stood little chance of getting support for emotional trauma or mental illness brought on by his wartime experiences.  Without a real outlet, the young man probably suffered horribly, steeping in a pressure cooker of inescapable emotional hell.  

I don't really believe anyone can come back from a war without suffering mental or emotional harm of some kind.

You had post traumatic stress? Did you go to war?

My father was in the army. He never went to war, thankfully. He was a helicopter technician. He did, however, have friends who came back shells of their former selves. To him, it was heartbreaking. He watched helplessly as some of his oldest friends divorced from their wives and became alcoholics because they had no proper counselling and had no real coping mechanism.

That, in itself was a trauma for my dad.

I'm so incredibly fortunate that i've been brought up away from such atrocities. I can't imagine what it must be like for a generation of people who've grown up in Iraq or other countries facing the blight of war.

My grandfather had PTSD from WW2. The only thing he ever told my mother about it was, he saw his best friend get blown up on HMS Ajax. That was it. everything else was buried. He was amongst the thousands who stormed the beaches on D-Day. I'll never really understand what he must have been forced to cope with.

It is totally heartbreaking.

Quote from: "karadan"You had post traumatic stress? Did you go to war?

I was homeless as a young woman which caused me to be repeatedly assaulted including one brutal assault which left me in a coma for about 8 days. The injuries incurred (both physical and mental) during those assaults probably caused me to be homeless far longer than I might have been.

Quote from: "Kylyssa"

Quote from: "karadan"You had post traumatic stress? Did you go to war?

I was homeless as a young woman which caused me to be repeatedly assaulted including one brutal assault which left me in a coma for about 8 days. The injuries incurred (both physical and mental) during those assaults probably caused me to be homeless far longer than I might have been.

Wow,

That is sad

I hope everything is better for you now, than it was.

Quote from: "joy_landlocked"this is so sad and frustrating.  maybe if the guy had felt he could go to his family or friends and discuss his feelings and doubts, this would never have happened.  i bet he felt he'd be alienated if he tried to talk about it.  it's really unfortunate that he had to feel so alone.

I have the feeling you are right. Of course, we will never know.

Those of us who were once under the christianity delusion know that shedding it is a difficult proccess, made even harder by fundie relatives. The isolation this guy must have felt...

OK, I'm just gonna say it, maybe the son couldn't cope with the implications from TGD.  Maybe he made some bad inferences based on faulty reasoning or general ignorance.  Maybe he had been wanting to kill himself his entire life, having been miserable in a very deep and personal way, and he only found he could after he no longer believed he was going to hell for it.

It is entirely possible that the son's death resulted very directly from reading TGD.  So I say we admit it's possible.  It's still no different from a martyr throwing their life away because they believe a holy book, or the the son killing himself because there was a gun handy to do it with (which I'd deem far more directly responsible).  It's tragic, but it isn't a sign that we should ban supposed holy books, cars, guns, alcohol, or TGD.  It's just an object, it's up to us what we do with it.  Time to stop blaming objects for the choices made by people.  Unless the object in question can never be used outside of a malicious purpose, or the risk is far too great for the time being (plutonium, anyone?), then it's time to stop rerouting the blame.

The father should be told plainly that TGD didn't kill his son, his son killed his son after reading TGD, as well as having breakfast previously.  It's cold, it's impersonal, it's the truth.   I've come close to killing myself a few times, namely during my angsty teen years.  But I never wanted to die more than I wanted to live, at least for someone else.  This guy wanted to die more than he wanted to live.  TGD didn't want him to die more than he wanted to live, he did.

I'm sorry I'm ranting, here, but this is a very important distinction in other aspects of life.  Guns, video games, movies, atheism, and the like don't need to be controlled for responsible, sane, mentally prepared people.

Hope no one takes issue with this post, it sucks that the son died, it really, really does.  If he were my son, I'd be torn apart.  As someone else said, I hope the father thinks him unaware and lost to the world rather than burning in eternal fire.  This probably isn't the case, but I wish it were so the situation would be slightly less tragic.

That is all.

Quote from: "PipeBox"Time to stop blaming objects for the choices made by people.

I don't think he's blaming the book, he's blaming the ideas in the book.

I think he's blaming atheism, because he desperately wants to avoid being blamed himself.

Quote from: "bowmore"

Quote from: "PipeBox"Time to stop blaming objects for the choices made by people.

I don't think he's blaming the book, he's blaming the ideas in the book.

I think he's blaming atheism, because he desperately wants to avoid being blamed himself.

He'd still be blaming the book for being Lethal Atheism: The Condensed Field Guide.  The book is made out to be a key factor in the suicide.  If it had been said "Atheism and atheist books," it would've been different.  The book is singled out as a malicious source.  You can't get an idea banned from human thought, but you can sue writers and get bookstores to remove books from their shelves, which is probably something the father would like to effect.  As to whether he'll act on it, probably never in any newsworthy way.

All that aside, a google search implies atheists are more prone to suicide.  They're also less violent and commit less crime.  Correlation says nothing of causality, as both atheists and theist tend to scream in this case, it just suggests a link.  And not to sound like an ass, but I far prefer that unhappy people kill themselves rather than kill others.

Maybe it's just as fair to blame atheism, because when his son was no longer afraid of damnation he was finally able to kill himself.  Maybe the idea of atheism depressed him greatly.  Maybe he, based on a totally misguided understanding, wanted to see which side was right.  Maybe it was a combination.  Hardly matters.  The blame lies with the son, no one forced him to do anything.  Was the father supposed to protect him from every new idea, ban every book but the Bible, and hide the state of the world from his son on the off chance that any one of these things inspired him to suicide? No.  We're not going to play that game, where maybe if A, B, and C were banned, or we force people to avoid exposure to D, E, and F, there would be less suicide.  It is unreasonable censorship for things a vast majority of people can handle, in my experience.  The son saw and did a lot of stuff while he was alive.  One or many of these things prompted him to suicide, but the son is in a very small minority.  Upon this prompting, he killed himself, of his own accord, based on what he'd seen.

If the father doesn't want circumstances and ideas and objects to kill people, he better get to work on banning atheism, religion, girlfriends, boyfriends, money, books, language, conscious thought and physical pain.  The short way would be to rig up some kind of feeding system and then put us all in a coma, or some vegetative state.  Then the world would be a better place, where his son couldn't kill himself.  Also, no one would be able to love each other.  But that's small peanuts because we'd all have a pulse until we succumbed to some disease, or malfunction of the feed tube, or some natural occurrence.  Clearly, this is ridiculous, and no sane person would endorse it.  Easier to let as many as 30 people per 100,000 per year kill themselves.  We can seek to reduce the rate through offers of counseling, and by paying more attention to each other, reminding others what they mean to us.  We're not going to start banning things everytime a tragic story springs up.

It doesn't matter if the father is absolutely right and TGD and atheism brought about his son's suicide, it's about what is done because of it.

Quote from: "PipeBox"The father should be told plainly that TGD didn't kill his son, his son killed his son after reading TGD, as well as having breakfast previously.  It's cold, it's impersonal, it's the truth.   I've come close to killing myself a few times, namely during my angsty teen years.  But I never wanted to die more than I wanted to live, at least for someone else.  This guy wanted to die more than he wanted to live.  TGD didn't want him to die more than he wanted to live, he did.

Well said.  It's also important to note that the story was written and posted by World Net Daily (WND), a conservative news source which promotes fundy Christianity and conservative agendas.  

Notice in the midst of the article ( http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php? ... geId=81459 (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=81459) ) the presence of these hyperlinked words :

QuoteDiscover how atheism and immorality are being cleverly sold to Americans in David Kupelian's controversial best seller, "The Marketing of Evil."

That hyperlink takes you to this site ...
http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?DEPA ... EM_ID=1679 (http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?DEPARTMENT_ID=6&SUBDEPARTMENT_ID=94&ITEM_ID=1679)

... which promotes a book marketed by "ShopWND.com" ... The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom  

(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.wnd.com%2Fstore%2Fimages%2Fitems%2FB0488.jpg&hash=067e38933a26ab5fbddc8e4ca721cfd09213d222)

What is probably most dispicable of all about this story (but not surprising), is that the tragic death of this young  man is being used to anger & motivate conservative/Christian visitors of the WND website to spend money at their marketing subsidiary.

.