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Comment by djtriptych | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me you're under 25 y/o

Because I'm suggesting that there might be less community support today than in the past because fewer people today attend church which historically has been a major source of social interaction within a community? I fail to see how this is a ridiculous hypothesis. It might not be true, but ridiculing someone for their hypothesis instead of addressing the hypothesis itself doesn't speak well to your own level of maturity.

So what about the millions of years of human social interaction before church?

I fail to see how our primate ancestors ability to socialize outside of church somehow disproves that removing a large social component in modern American life could lead to less social support.

I just did a quick google search on church affiliation and suicide rates (to bring this back to the original article and my hypothesis), here's an interesting study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on the topic:

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.16...

So at least one study seems to support the hypothesis (interesting that it also showed increased substance abuse, which was also discussed as one of the culprit's of the higher death rate for white men).

Well if you did a quick google search, I guess I'll abandon my argument based on millions of years of human evolution.

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