The study found that married people had a five-percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared to single people. The project at NYU's Lagone Medical Center is the largest study to ever look at the link between marriage and heart health
A study of 3.5 million American adults has found that married people have lower odds of cardiovascular disease than those who are single, divorced or widowed.
“Our survey results clearly show that when it comes to cardiovascular disease, marital status really does matter,” Dr. Carlos Alviar, who led the study at New York University’s Lagone Medical Center, told the Associated Press. He called it the largest study to ever look at the link between marriage and heart health.
“A spouse can help keep doctor’s appointments and provide transportation, making for easier access to health care services,” Dr. Jeffrey Berger, another senior member of the project, says in an infographic laying out the study’s findings.
The study found that married people had a five-percent lower risk of any cardiovascular disease compared to single people, that widowed people had a three-percent greater risk, and divorced people a five-percent greater risk. Those numbers improved significantly for younger married couples, as those under age 50 had a 12-percent lower chance of heart disease than other young single people.
The study also found that smoking, a major cause of heart disease, was highest among divorced people and lowest in widowed ones. Obesity was most common in those single and divorced, and widowed people suffered from the highest rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and inadequate exercise.
The study was conducted from 2003 through 2008 at more than 20,000 screening sites in all 50 states. The average age was 64 years, and 63% of the participants were women. Almost 90% were white.
The study will be presented March 29 in Washington, D.C., at the annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology.
School officials forced a female student to give up her password after she posted about a mean hall monitor and flirted with a classmate on Facebook, even though the post and conversation happened off-campus and after school hours
A Minnesota teen is getting a $70,000 payday because school administrators demanded her Facebook password to investigate her social media history when she was caught doing totally normal tween things in sixth grade.
Riley Stratton, now 15, was questioned by school administrators and a police officer after posting on Facebook that she hated a mean school hall monitor and had a sexually-charged conversation with a boy in her class. This was a shocking allegation, since everyone knows that sixth grade girls LOVE hall monitors and HATE flirting with boys.
Administrators demanded that she tell them her Facebook password so they could investigate her social media history, even though both the post and the conversation happened off-campus and outside of school hours. “I was in tears,” Stratton told the Star Tribune Tuesday, “I was embarrassed when they made me give over my password.”
The ACLU took up Stratton’s case, and won her $70,000 in damages from the school district, and the administration has promised to rewrite its privacy policies. “A lot of schools, like the folks at Minnewaska, think that just because it’s easier to know what kids are saying off campus through social media somehow means the rules have changed, and you can punish them for what they say off campus,” said Wallace Hilke, the Minnesota ACLU lawyer who argued Stratton’s case. “They punished her for doing exactly what kids have done for 100 years — complaining to her friends about teachers and administrators.”
Minnewaska Superintendent Greg Schmidt did not admit any district liability in the incident, but said the case highlights the debate over how big a role schools should play in parenting their students, especially when it comes to delicate issues like cyberbullying.
“Some people think schools go too far and I get that,” Schmidt told the Star Tribune. “But we want to make kids aware that their actions outside school can be detrimental.”
Now, thanks to the justice team at the ACLU, tweens everywhere can sleep at night knowing their principal will never see their steamy convos with Josh from P.E.
YouTube videos go viral all the time, but sermons rarely do. Enter Jefferson Bethke, a young "spoken-word" poet who recently posted the video "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." It has been viewed more than 10 million times in the past 10 days.
The video opens with an eerie soundtrack and the phrase "Jesus>Religion" in a stark, white typeface. His poem begins, "What if I told you, Jesus came to abolish religion?"
In a polished, hip style, he continues with such controversial questions for four minutes: "If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars? Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor?" Mr. Bethke describes religion as no more than "behavior modification" and "a long list of chores." This leads him to conclude, "Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums." And his grand finale: "So know I hate religion, in fact I literally resent it."
Other YouTube users have posted response videos, and countless bloggers have commented on the quality of his poetry, the sharpness of the production and the errors in his theology. Among the most ardent critics are Catholics who see Catholic-bashing in Mr. Bethke's attack against organized religion, particularly in his suggestion that religion is "just following some rules."
On his blog "Bad Catholic," Marc Barnes highlights Mr. Bethke's indictments of religion for building huge churches at the expense of the poor and telling "single Moms God doesn't love them if they've had a divorce." Though Mr. Barnes agrees with some of the poem, he writes, "I can't help but think, in the midst of all this, that this hating-religion-loving-Jesus thing is the logical consequence of Protestantism."
Yet the Protestant response has been strong as well. Kevin DeYoung, a blogger at "The Gospel Coalition," a popular Reformed Christian site, wrote that "amidst a lot of true things in this poem there is a lot that is unhelpful and misleading."
YouTube
A screen shot of Jefferson Bethke in his video 'Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus."
Mr. Bethke, he notes, "perfectly captures the mood, and in my mind the confusion, of a lot of earnest, young Christians" who interpret the word religion to mean "self-righteousness, moral preening, and hypocrisy." The problem, Mr. DeYoung notes, is this is not what religion is, and Jesus didn't hate religion. Jesus was an observant Jew, Mr. DeYoung points out. Jesus clearly said he didn't come to abolish the law or ignore the prophecies but to fulfill them. In fact he founded the church and instituted the sacrament of communion.
Mr. DeYoung is correct to identify Mr. Bethke's sentiment as typical of his generation of young evangelical Christians. The notion that "Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship" has been echoing through the sanctuaries of evangelical, and particularly nondenominational, churches since at least the 1970s. Mr. Bethke's own pastor, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, promotes a distinction between "religious people" and "Jesus people": "Religion is about me" but "Christianity . . . is about Jesus," Mr. Driscoll preached in 2007.
As Mr. Barnes of "Bad Catholic" notes, this is a particularly Protestant sentiment that can be traced back to theologian Karl Barth, who often distinguished between "revelation" and religion.
This is the kind of Christianity in which I was raised, where a man with a high school degree and a "calling" can lead a congregation, where a pastor can spend millions advertising an apocalypse only he predicted, and where a church burns the Koran and leads to the unnecessary deaths of innocent people halfway across the world.
Stating that religions build churches at the expense of the poor, as Mr. Bethke does, turns a blind eye to the single greatest charitable institution on the planet. Blaming religion for wars ignores the fact that the greatest mass murderers in the 20th century—indeed in all of history—killed for nonreligious reasons. And advocating for a kind of Christianity that is free of the "bondage" of religion opens the door to dangerous theological anarchy that is all too common among young evangelicals and absolutely antithetical to biblical Christianityresponse - http://youtu.be/8dqnfz4y8uA http://youtu.be/AwetTNAGC44 http://youtu.be/EIZIC13QO1c http://youtu.be/Ru_tC4fv6FE http://youtu.be/hRpam5OJ09k The view presented here are in no way the views promoted, supported or not supported by ACGC. They are the view of the people in the video alone.
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