Subject: [AthofSV] Re: Are religious people healthier than godless people??

From: "earthboundje" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:02:26 -0000

Helen, 

I agree with Walter: the faithful are healthier.  I know I feel an 
elevated sense of health in a church, but of course this is a 
subjective account and many atheists find their experience is the 
exact opposite.

The church-goers (not necessarily believers) I've met in Santa 
Cruz (Twin Lakes in Aptos) seem to be in a good place.  They have a 
community to belong to (despite its limits), and people often know, 
trust, and love each other well within that community.  They don't 
consider each other strangers, even if they don't walk up and talk 
to each other.  And, like children, they don't worry half as much 
about the things that normally plague adults.  

Every service I've been to in the past 2 months has delivered the 
message that the sins (stresses, evils, poisons) of the world don't 
matter once you understand that Jesus is going to take care of it 
all.  If you can throw your heart into something like that, it's a 
hell of a load off your back.  Believers still have health problems, 
but they ask to be prayed for (well-wished) by their community, and 
astonishingly, people do it.  That's a beautiful thing, isn't it?  
It might not be effective and it's obviously not something you can 
rely on medically, but it's at least comforting, psychologically 
stimulating, and the potential stress-relief benefits are probably
immeasurable.  I think socialized animals require this in order to 
live well.

By contrast, people of little faith are left to worry and feel the 
deep guilt of responsibility, and the pain of toxicity wherever we 
discover the new depths to which humanity has sunk.  We know many 
sad and awful truths, and they fuse with our intellectual growth, 
and all the real things -- all the complexities, the violations, the 
toxins -- have the potential to weigh down our minds, our energies, 
our health, and our relationships.  We'd have to become dissociative 
(isolated & multiple-personality) to live in perfect bliss in the 
midst of watching things go awry all around us.  

Atheism is not the easy way out; not by any means.

This is why people turn to religion, not because they're stupid.  
The beautiful cathedrals, the sprawling compounds, the outreach 
services, the gratifying work you can do for the community, the 
strangers who hug you and listen to you, the music - oh the music... 
composed by ancient geniuses celebrating the highest order of 
intellect purely for the glorification of the human race...  and 
it's all free.  Religion might not be what we wish to live on, but 
certainly you can see the potential.

So in our society, even now, it falls upon religion to give us a 
sense of communal identity, because religion sets itself apart from 
the gross anatomy of economics, disgusting facts, and chemical need 
that comprise our biological existence.  

If the atheist community is going to become a healthy demographic, 
atheists are going to have to come up with something that compares, 
even slightly, to this offering of peace and community.

As placebos go, I don't think you can beat the image of THE CREATOR 
AND OWNER OF THE UNIVERSE washing away everything bad that ever 
happened to you or because of you.

- Jonathan

--- In [email-masked], "Walter Hecker" <HeckerW@c...> wrote:
> 
> Helen Kahn asked:
> > Do you think religious people are healthier than godless people?
> 
> Definitely Yes.
> 
> If religious people actually abide by their own rules - which is 
likelier
> among them than among non-religious people - then they have fewer 
unhealthy
> vices.  It stands to reason that they consume less alcohol, smoke 
less, are
> less promiscuous, even might go to bed earlier.
> 
> Now, they naturally want us to believe that their better health is 
due to
> their god treating believers more favorably than non-believers or 
due to the
> practice of prayer actually working.
> 
> Walter Hecker

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