I doubt underlying depression rates are any higher today than in the past. It’s just not pushed under the rug anymore.

Not believing in an afterlife is fantastic! When I die my life is complete, and what I did during my life is all that matters. No worries about having to meet some arbitrary moral code or fighting for eternity or being reincarnated, just the void like before I was born.

Now living s And becoming more and more aware of how completely awful people can be, that is depressing.

Really? Science disproved God? News to me, could you tell me more?

I was raised Catholic, but as time went on and I left it, I think one of the misconceptions people who are still deeply religious have is that atheists or non-religious people are continually thinking about NOT having religion as much as religious people think about their religion, but the fact of the matter is, sometimes MONTHS go by where I don’t have a single thought about religion, the afterlife, God… When you grow up in an organized religion you tend to feel the lack of religion is some kind of continual rejection of it, and it’s hard to imagine people for whom it just isn’t a presence in ANY sense. When you realize the presence of religion is neither necessary or sufficient for any part of life, you can start to see how life satisfaction or lack thereof has nothing to do with belief. There are horribly depressed devout worshipers and annoyingly peppy and positive atheists. It’s an entirely different axis.

Sorry but nothing has been proven whether or not God or any diety exists . There is so much about this universe that is way beyond our understanding.

I am depressed because we are living in an ecological disaster wrapped in social disorder with a side dish of war.

All of the depression I have, has been caused by the people who believe in all that.

also I’m an atheist but I don’t think it’s because science has “proven there’s no god”

nah there is probably tens of thousands of years of human history before we invented an afterlife

A depression is an illness. “Feeling depressed” is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is a bodily malfunction that needs to be treated with appropriate medicine.

If believing in some “higher being” or “the afterlife” helps an individual to deal with the symptoms of a depression that’s great, but not believing such things does not cause a depression.

After I die, I’m dead. who gives a fuck there’s no after life? I certainly won’t I’ll be dead.

Never found the idea of god particularly comforting

“When I’m dead, just throw me in the trash” - Frank Reynolds

You can’t disprove something like that. You can make convincing arguments, but only to people that don’t really believe in the first place; it’s just arguments if their faith is good.

Seriously, you can’t prove an invisible, undetectable phenomenon doesn’t exist. You can only prove that it doesn’t give any measurable affects. And that’s measurable so you just go right back to arguing to a wall if the faith is there.

But, no, the rest of the premise is flawed too. There are plenty of secular humanists that aren’t depressed, and plenty of people in religions, including christianity (since that’s the bias the question has) are.

Besides, who says the idea of an afterlife is comforting? Or that any given afterlife would be if you accept all of them as possible? The idea is absolutely horrifying to some because you’re stuck with whatever it is forever. Eternity, stuck in some religion’s heaven or hell, and neither is exactly as rosy an outlook as you’d think before looking into what is canonical about the various heavens.

But even reincarnation is horrifying. Doing this shit over and over and over until you get lucky and get the right life to figure out how to escape the cycle? Fuck that noise.

Joining a universal consciousness? Just as bad. Stuck in that state, watching the horrors of the universe play out? Not even if I don’t have to remember being human, tyvm.

Life was absolutely not better when christianity was even more dominant and using whatever sick ideology of the afterlife they cooked up as a threat to obey.

Hell, just the idea that people weren’t just as depressed 100 years ago is bullshit. They just didn’t talk about it. But I had the opportunity to sit with people born in the 19th century, and can tell you that faith in an afterlife did not make them less depressed. It may have, on an individual level, helped them process grief, but that’s a different thing, and I can promise you that nothing tests faith like grief.

If depression is more common now (rather than being more reported and discussed, and I don’t know which it might be, or if it’s a combination), have you looked at the world lately? You don’t have to go looking for missing faith as a reason for depression when the absolute shit storm brewing currently is there.

And the younger folks? The kids and very young adults I know, their anxiety is very much linked to the world trying to be shittier instead of improving. Maybe that won’t happen, but I don’t know anyone under 21 that isn’t dealing with some degree of anxiety post covid. Hell, I don’t know many adults that aren’t.

Keep the afterlife lol.

If science has proven something, that means there’s a falsifiable hypothesis, and experiments you can perform.

You cannot prove a negative. Example: unicorns don’t exist, prove it… At best, you can demonstrate there is no recorded observation of unicorn, that is a far cry from saying there are no unicorns anywhere.