Churchgoers Live Longer
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 03 April 2006
11:29 am ET

There are many things you can do to increase your life expectancy: exercise, eat well, take your medication and … go to church.

A new study finds people who attend religious services weekly live longer. Specifically, the research looked at how many years are added to life expectancy based on:

*Regular physical exercise: 3.0-to-5.1 years

*Proven therapeutic regimens: 2.1-to-3.7 years

*Regular religious attendance: 1.8-to-3.1 years———-
Okay, your choice, jog and sweat like a pig OR sit on your butt and listen to the choir.

While I am exceedingly dubious of the notion of distant intercessory prayer as therapeutic, as some have alluded to here, there are thousands of studies, many of which are methodologically sound, which demonstrate therapeutic effects for the individual patient arising from praying or engaging in other kinds of spiritual activities.

Most of the best of these studies are compiled in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Health, and the Journal of Religion and Health also has spent some time on the notion, which is termed (sorry if this makes anyone cringe), the ‘epidemiology of religion.’

Full disclosure: I am an atheist interdisciplinary Ph.D student who studies the medical humanities and has done some study of the interplay between religion and health (though my primary focus is clinical medical ethics and health policy, not religious studies).

Though I am well aware that not all or even most of the studies on the therapeutic effects of religious practice on health are legitimate, it seems difficult to dispute the notion that there are more than a bare few which are methodologically sound. I respectfully disagree with those here who are arguing that religious praxis is not correlated with therapeutic health effects. NOTE: I am certainly not suggesting that providers ought to ‘prescribe’ religion or any such notion, at all, nor am I asserting ANY kind of causal relationship, nor am I offering any conclusions as to the significance of the findings. I am merely suggesting that there are sufficient valid studies on the issue to justify the opinion that there is some statistically significant correlation between the two.

The notion of distant intercessory prayer, which was at issue in the AHA study, is a related but different inquiry, one in which, as noted here, the studies are not really compelling.

Besides this, you have to be responsible for your choices. If you lived your life in excess (eating wrong, not exercising…blah, blah, blah) you are likely to experience heart trouble later in life.

Sin will kill you (not God – sin). Sin is living in a way contrary to what is good for you. And who better to determine what is good/bad for you than your Creator?

But, if you’re sick – what YOU believe will have a significant effect on the outcome of your surgery – if you have a positive outlook on life – and you can, especially if you believe that God loves you, you’re in a better position to come out alive after surgery.

Yes. NZ has devout Christians too. The difference is that there’s less of them and they’re aware that they’re in a minority. The limiting factor for such a study would be that money for research is much more limited in NZ, so it would be unusual to get such a study done here for funding reasons.

Yeah, but if patients were part of an organised religious group beforehand, they might well know that they’re being prayed for anyway, which’ll skew things.
Even if patients are not members. I’m not a member of any religious group, no matter how disorganised. But I know that if I was in hospital for a major operation there’d be people praying for me whether I like it or not. Christians are a bit unstoppable that way.

ethics committee.

But then I realized they were also trying to study the effect of prayers. This is confusing. Either you study psychological effects, or (if you want to be eccentric) you could, I suppose, study supernatural effect of praying, fine. But why would you want to combine two unrelated phenomena into one experiment?

This is silly. While on it, why wouldn’t they also subject some of these people to loud heavy metal music?

As I recall from Sunday School, testing God is supposed to be a no-no. In the second of the three temptations of Christ, Satan takes Jesus to the top of a temple and tells him to jump off in order to prove that God will save him from death. Jesus refuses, saying, “It is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

It’s the same deal for prayer: it works, but not if it’s being done for the purpose of testing that it works. It’s sort of the Heisenberg Principle of Christianity.

I seem to recall something about experimentation as temptation in Mann’s Doctor Faustus as well.

(1) So your claim is that you don’t actually have to live the Christian lifestyle, tithe, or, heck, even go to church? It’s enough to pray a few minutes a day. This is certainly a novel approach to religion, but one that I imagine could be popular in this day and age.

(2) An aspect of opportunity cost is that by backing god A you are implicitly (and heck, sometime implicitly) insulting god B. Your model is based on the assumption that the choices are “no god” or “god”, but the choices are in fact, “no god”, xtianity (of a hundred different flavors, mormonism, judaism, islam, zoroastrianism, hinduism, etc etc.

Why do you hate me so?

My fault. One last time. The benefits to the prayee are bs and the benefits to the prayer are real, god or no god.

A few extra minutes of prayer vs watching the commercials during CSI Memphis isn’t even a contest. The prayer wins.

I guess the phrase “opportunity cost” means nothing to you?

Similarly, you have to have the right prayer. Like pills, it depends on the composition of the prayer. Obviously.

Luckily, after doing years of research, me and my associates stumbled on the right and infallible prayer, the only one that attracts the Demiurge’s attention. Yes, it involves the Lord’s Prayer backwards… you have all heard the rumors. But the difference is ONE LITTLE WORD.

Yes, friends, one little word and you can be cured of anything from Beri Beri to the worst cancer. And that power can be yours… for just a minimum emolument. Science tested! New and improved! An infinitely blessed relief, for a mere pittance, I’m telling you, half of what you would pay for a four year stay in a elite hospital!

I accept credit cards, too.