So….anyone doing anything special?

@openid.aol.com/runnswim:

most frequently thank you for my wife (the best person currently living on this planet).

Funny how you think that about your wife, and yet, I believe that about mine as well. I’m pretty sure that I’d be worse off than I am right now, if not for her influence.

As for religion, many people wonder how I can be a person of religious “faith”, and yet also an admirer of Ayn Rand’s, even going so far as to use one of her characters(perhaps her most famous one), as my ‘handle’ here on FA. The answer really is simple. I’ve seen, and experienced, a number of wonderful, unexplainable happenings in my life, at this point, to disbelieve that there isn’t some being out there responsible for them.

Another point on religion( And probably the most poignant revelation I have had); If not for a supreme being, responsible for all of the wonder, majesty, and beauty within our world, and the universe, then why are we here? It is simply too hard for me to believe that everything we can see and experience was created by a ball of plasma energy, just because. How did that ball of plasma energy get there? How is it that it resulted in the beings(animals and men) that are on the earth today, with all of the beautiful plant life, and all of it working in near perfect concert to allow for life to happen? It can be an overwhelming experience just thinking about it, when you consider that without a supreme, intelligent being, responsible for everything that has happened, and will happen, in this world, and the universe, that the question of Why? cannot be answered.

Anyway, your post was a pretty good one, that I mostly agree with, with only one, small disagreement.

and I despise certitude in virtually all forms.

I have a problem with that statement, due to the fact that there is certitude in nearly everything, and that unless there is, there wouldn’t be the ability to learn knowledge. There wouldn’t be a black, nor a white, but everything in varying shades of gray. No right, nor wrong, but only varying degrees of rightness or wrongness. Reason doesn’t allow me to accept partially right, or partially wrong, as acceptable. Just a thought.

@Patricia:

As for Ayn Rand, I too fail to see the compatibility with Christianity, as the women was totally devoid of love, except for herself and money. At it’s core, Objectivism is purely anti-Christian.

Not quite, Patricia. Rand’s view of love was such that she believed the highest compliment, or honor, that one could give to another was their desire to interact with them. For two people engaging in trade, the fact that one desired to trade with another, showed the magnitude of their respect for that person. The same idea happens in love. The fact that I wish to spend time with my wife, engaging with her in all manner of actions, pleasurable to straight conversation, and from the high standards that I set, to do so, shows the depth of my love for her.

As for money, it is merely a symbol of one’s success. And why live, other than to achieve success, with money being one standard, or symbol, of one aspect, of a person’s success in life? It isn’t the love for money, which many people mistakenly get from her books, but the love of success, that drives the characters she has created.

I do not wish to get into a theological discussion, however, I believe that Objectivism is not anti-Christian, and that instead, it is somewhat mutually compatible with Christianity. I didn’t go quite far enough, in my comments above, but when one uses reason, in terms of religious belief, neither did Ms. Rand. She didn’t go so far as to ascertain the reason of “Why?”, as in, “Why are we here?”. If she had, she would have found that an atheistic view does not answer that question any better than one from a religious standpoint, and that to view an answer to that question, from atheism, takes just as much faith as it does if one answers from a religious view. Hence, it is one aspect that Objectivism, or the use of reason, fails to answer, and that man must, therefore, rely on faith, for whatever answer one decides. Of course, one could simply fail to answer, and assume it an unanswerable question, giving neither atheism, or religion, weight over the other, but rather, stand on the assumption that it could be either, and that only the lack of knowledge required, in order to answer it, is the reason for it to remain unanswered.

Also, and this does get into a bit of theological discussion, I don’t believe the bible to be an accurate representation of the words of Jesus Christ, as it was written by fallible man, most notably a Roman emperor, in response to an attempt to unify Rome’s subjects under a common religious banner. I believe in a God. I believe that Jesus was the son of God. I do not, however, believe that his words and teachings are accurately portrayed within the Bible. Just my thoughts.

@gaffa: Here are two reasonably comprehensive reviews in the peer-review medical literature:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19142047

There were 69 studies (28 articles) and 22 studies (11 articles) investigating the association between religiosity/spirituality and mortality in initially healthy populations and diseased populations, respectively. The results of the meta-analyses showed that religiosity/spirituality was associated with reduced mortality in healthy population studies (combined hazard ratio = 0.82, 95% CI = 0.76-0.87, p <0.001), but not in diseased population studies (combined hazard ratio = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.94-1.01, p = 0.19). Notably, the protective effect of religiosity/spirituality in the initially healthy population studies was independent of behavioral factors (smoking, drinking, exercising, and socioeconomic status), negative affect, and social support. We divided studies according to the aspects of religiosity/spirituality measure examined, and found that organizational activity (e.g. church attendance) was associated with greater survival in healthy population studies. Multi-dimensional aspects were related to survival in both the healthy and diseased populations. Religiosity/spirituality was negatively associated with cardiovascular mortality in healthy population studies.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12058703
http://www.theannals.com/cgi/reprint/36/6/1090.pdf

Some excerpts:

among US community samples, whether regional
or national, frequent religious practices such as attending
religious services emerges as a factor linked with
living longer even when confounding variables are statistically
controlled for. How frequently one attends religious
services is a measure of religious participation and may not
necessarily indicate spiritual commitment. Nevertheless, in
longitudinal studies10 of community populations, the association
between religious/spiritual involvement and longevity
generally appears to be positive and statistically significant.

It is also noteworthy that these mortality findings generally
reflect large samples of people statistically analyzed
over time. The associations are not meant to be interpreted
as an assured health outcome for any one individual. Many
individuals who actively practice a strong spiritual or religious
faith die of terminal illnesses at an early age. Furthermore,
a spiritual motivation to care for, assist, or protect
others may propel individuals into life-threatening situations,
shortening their lives.

For both genders, weekly attendance was associated
with a statistically significant improvement in (1) quitting
smoking, (2) becoming frequently physically active, (3) alleviation
of depression, (4) increasing the number of individual
personal relationships, and (5) initiating and sustaining
stable marriages (Table 1). Additionally, women were
more likely to stop heavy drinking. Notably, attenders did
not all start with such healthy lifestyle behaviors. Improved
health behaviors and more extensive social relationships
occurred in conjunction with their becoming frequent
attenders at religious services. Persons who either
stopped going to religious services or never or infrequently
attended were more at risk for (1) stopping annual medical
checkups, (2) decreasing social relationships, and (3) becoming
divorced or separated.

When analyzing other social support and types of meeting
attendance, they found that although attending other
clubs rather than religious services failed to help people
live longer, a “complementary” effect appeared between
attendance and volunteer work. Persons who engaged in
volunteer work along with attending religious services
were even more likely to live longer than those who did
neither or only attended religious services.2

In a national sample28 of >21 000 US adults, researchers
examined rates of religious attendance and death rates by
any cause during a 9-year period. Analyses showed that attending
religious services more than once a week predicted
a 7-year longer life span for the overall population and a
14-year longer life for African Americans.

Regarding income and education, the researchers found
little evidence that religious attendance was associated
with lower mortality rates only because of socioeconomic
factors. In fact, somewhat surprisingly, religious attendance
in this national study outweighed socioeconomic
factors in helping to prevent earlier death:

Certain causes of death appeared more frequently among
non-attenders. Persons who never attended were about 4
times as likely to die from respiratory disease, diabetes, or
infectious diseases. However, adjusting for stronger social
ties also helped reduce the risk of diabetes. In addition,
healthier lifestyle choices, such as not smoking, lowered
the risk of death from respiratory and circulatory diseases.
But these factors did not fully account for the gap between
very high attenders and non-attenders in risk of death from
these diseases. Consequently, the study found frequent religious
attendance was consistently protective across all
causes of death analyzed, but to different magnitudes, depending
on the disease.28

In a meta-analysis summing the results of 42 study
samples totaling nearly 126 000 people, active religious involvement
increased odds of living longer by 29%.

This meta-analysis found that religious involvement
was associated with higher odds of survival, or conversely,
lower odds of death, during any specified follow-up period.
The relationship was so strong it would take 1418 new
studies showing no association between religious involvement
and living longer to overturn the significance of the
findings.

When summing studies, the review excluded mortality
studies that investigated only specific religious affiliation
— such as Muslim, Jewish, or Christian — and instead focused
on studies that included some measure of religious
involvement. For instance, the measures included how often
one attends religious services, how personally important
one ranks one’s religious faith, or the degree to which one
finds strength or comfort from one’s relationship with God.4

Interestingly, the review found a stronger link between
living longer and factors of participation in religious organizations
such as attending religious services, increasing
the odds of living longer by 43%, rather than from private
religious practices such as prayer, attitudes, or beliefs
alone, which increased the odds by only 4%. Also, the
meta-analysis found that the relationship between religious
involvement and mortality for women was considerably
stronger than for men, increasing the odds of living longer
for women by 59%, compared with 33% for men (Table
2). The gender difference might be due to differences in
the psychosocial resources that men and women receive
from religion, the researchers suggested. Because women
live longer than men and are generally more religious than
men in most cultures, the research team recommended that
researchers consider controlling for gender when looking
at the link between religion and mortality.4

Since other variables might predict longer lives (e.g.,
explanatory factors, such as living healthier lifestyles or increased
social support, or confounders, such as age, education,
income level, or better overall initial health), the review
closely examined studies that controlled for up to 15
variables that also might play some role in contributing to
living longer to assess what role they might play in explaining
the religious effect found in the lower odds of early
death among the more religious. These factors accounted
for part of the link, reducing the chances of living
longer among the more religious from 29% to 26% when
adjusting for the confounders of sociodemographic and
physical health status factors, and reducing it further to
23% when explanatory variables such as health practices,
social support, social connections, and marital status, were
controlled for (Table 2).4

The distinction between a positive effect of religiosity/spirituality on health and longevity in a baseline healthy population versus baseline diseased population is consistent with the famous prayer/intervention study you quoted. In the latter, there was a randomization (if memory serves — no more time to look it up right now) between (1) no prayers for recovery, (2) prayers for recovery with notification of patient being prayed for that he was receiving such prayers, and (3) prayers without notification. There was no difference between outcomes in patients who received no prayers and patients who received prayers without knowing they were receiving prayers. But the group that received prayers and were told that people were praying for them actually did significanty worse.

I think that the reason patients may do worse when people tell them they are praying for them is that they more or less get freaked out that they are in such a bad state of affairs to require divine intervention. So this increases their stress levels, decreases their immune function and what all, and they do worse. I conclude that it’s not a good idea to tell people that you are praying for them — it’s more of an anxiety elevator than something which helps.

Whatever the mechanisms, many, many studies have shown objective benefits to being religious and/or spiritual when it comes to long term health and longevity. The magnitude of aggregate benefit, as I stated, was equivalent to that of taking a hypothetical vaccine to permanently immunize against cancer. I consider religion to be a huge net positive for humanity, notwithstanding the obvious harm that it does, in certain ways. It’s sort of like the automobile — net benefit, despite the carnage.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA