David Sloan Wilson: "Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion"

[andyandy]

Oh and I love this one. The first serious controlled scientific study about prayer. The results are startling.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/529308

requires a log in.

i await my startling with eagerness....

 

[Faithkills]

hurrah!

you're relying on the minefield that is IQ tests? You should check out some of the SMMT threads - very heated

http://hypnosis.home.netcom.com/iq_vs_religiosity.htm

ok - this deserves more comment - two quick points - measure of "religiousity" rather than religion, and uses an intra-country IQ gauge....

Actually I think it's more useful to measure levels than a simple boolean. It does use an intra country gauge but given the amount of data and the obvious trend I would be surprised if a specific intra country study would show differently.

Is only with regards to atheists....and by a rather controvesial figure even within the IQ community...

And I would like to see the raw data, myself. And if it were just this study I would be dubious. But since it matches other findings..

would you also agree with his conclusions about white people being more intelligent than blacks? If not, why cherry pick which of his studies you choose to believe?

I would buy that too. Not because of any innate difference but because clearly no IQ test can be completely devoid of environmental influence. As a group blacks are more subject to poverty and receive less education. So I am not surprised by that finding but would probably question the interpretation.

http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence & religion.htm

This is an interesting link.

This was covered before - the difference between non-religious and religious as a whole does not exist. It's given as 9% - which is bang on the average.

The difference is notable. Notable enough that Barna tried later to obscure it. In any case my burden is still merely to show that atheists seem fine or better off without religion, so why is religion worth the cost?

It does seem a little strange that you dismiss sources such as the australian medical journal with over 30 footnoted cites as "a wall of opinion" but are happy to include blogs and personal websites without anything like such rigourous citation.

None of those citations was available alas. He had an opinion and pointed to stuff to justify it. I can post similar walls of pedigreed opinion but I don't think you would swallow it without seeing the data, nor should you.

If you really want to play who can assemble the biggest number of links to Phds who have opinions that support our position, I'm sorry I don't have time. But if you're impressed by that please do note that's covered in the data I linked, and in case you missed it.. We win

The data I posted you may question but at least you can see it, and we can reasonably and usefully discuss it.

So again. All I am showing is that atheists do not have religion and seem better off. So why do you think religion worth the individual and social costs?

 

[Faithkills]

requires a log in.

Sorry, I'll find another source. You'll love this.

 

[andyandy]

Actually I think it's more useful to measure levels than a simple boolean. It does use an intra country gauge but given the amount of data and the obvious trend I would be surprised if a specific intra country study would show differently.

nevertheless if one wants to separate religious belief from the larger socio-economic considerations upon which IQ flounders a sub population analysis would be much more appropriate.

And I would like to see the raw data, myself. And if it were just this study I would be dubious. But since it matches other findings..

what other findings?

I would buy that too. Not because of any innate difference but because clearly no IQ test can be completely devoid of environmental influence. As a group blacks are more subject to poverty and receive less education. So I am not surprised by that finding but would probably question the interpretation

.

so where does this leave the validity of IQ tests with which to draw your conclusions?

The difference is notable. Notable enough that Barna tried later to obscure it. In any case my burden is still merely to show that atheists seem fine or better off without religion, so why is religion worth the cost?

evidence that Barna tried to obscure it? Relevance? How does this effect the 9% average figure for both religious and non-religious? How is that notable?

I've provided three articles which make suggestions as to why. You have still not (after over 100 posts) addresssed them.

None of those citations was available alas. He had an opinion and pointed to stuff to justify it. I can post similar walls of pedigreed opinion but I don't think you would swallow it without seeing the data, nor should you.

i would give more weight to a fully referenced article in a national medical journal than to a personal blog.

The data I posted you may question but at least you can see it, and we can reasonably and usefully discuss it.

yes, and i am happy that we have finally got to this stage

So again. All I am showing is that atheists do not have religion and seem better off. So why do you think religion worth the individual and social costs?

So once again please address the studies that suggest that there is some benefit. My position is not black or white, 100% benefical/100% bad. One one expect the default position to be somewhere inbetween. You continue to post as if you hold the 100% bad position, but simply ignoring evidence to suggest benefit doesn't make that evidence go away.

I'm finished for tonight - when i log back on tomorrow i expect a full appraisal of all the data to suggest that there is some benefit

 

[newlyfound]

That's my mother you are talking about.

You mean religion is your mother? ...if that's the case, it used to be my mother too, so I speak from experience.

This is a biased inaccurate view of most people who are religious. Are you interested in forming a more realistic picture of religious believers? If so, Wilson's work isn't a bad starting point.

I don't think I will need to do that as I have been one for a long time, and as such I've socialized with other religious (many, and from multiple backgrounds), so the "inaccurate view" I've formed, I have from what I lived and witnessed. Nothing beats live real experiences. Wilson cannot tell me anything about myself that I already don't know.

I doubt the study was able to delineate drug users since it's an illegal activity that few would admit to. However, I would not assume that they are 'happies' because they also have the 'coming down' aspect of using, the physical side effects, etc.

He said "happy". What does that mean?...and I say "happy" is not all there is. Happy is an end result that one can reach through various routes of which not all are safe and responsible as the above example shows. Ask a drug user how happy they are while high and record how extatic they are at that very moment. And speaking about "illegal" vs. legal, alcohol is legal, pot is legal in California, prostitution is legal in Holland. The legality of religion does not legitimize it as the social disease it is.

The study asked people, at random times during the day, to report how they were feeling. Religious people came out as generally feeling happier. Thus, it is evidence that religion provides some benefit to the believer.

and I am supposed to just take his word for it (as I said, I've been there)? just who is he? jesus? I don't believe that for a single sec. And even it it were, how is constantly living in the clouds about how one is gonna go to heaven after they die, and how satan is around the corner waiting to embush them, how god is stalking them on second basis, added to the rest of the paganic junk that is known to fill a believer's head, is supposed to be a good sane way of bringing about happiness into one's own life? Richard Dawkins showed me few basic simple verifiable demonstrable elements that effectively contributed to zaping out the god mosquito out of my head's surroundings. And I owe him for it. Prior to that, I struggeled for years. Even after I've done some reading to help me get out, I still kept on going back and forth. The way I see it, his book was not written for people like Sloan, but for the masses, the commoners, people like me. He Dddarn did an Outstanding Job!

I don't think it's meaningless, although I don't know exactly how they measured such things as 'happy", "sociable" etc.

First, happiness and sociablity are both relative as the above example shows (drug addicts like to get together and hang out, isn't that being social?). Being relatively new atheist, I come here and I feel like I am a kid in playground with all interesting well grounded people that come here and with all they have to share as far as perspective, whether it be scientific, religious, philosophical etc. yet this man seems to think I am less happy now than I was when i believed. His study is useless and irrelevant.

I presume that if I were to review his work, the way those feelings were assessed and quantified would be laid out in detail. If you want to review his work and post why it isn't an accurate way to measure such things, that's fine. But what you've posted here comes across as denigration just because you don't like the results.

I am not going to agree either just so someone doesn't get their feelings hurt in the process. I am not talking about you here, neither would I agree unless what is being said makes total sense to me. See? theists expect you to just agree no matter how much b s they hit you with.

BTW, why is it if he disagrees with Dawkins on this particular point - a point he's studied in depth and Dawkins hasn't - you refer to him as "supposedly being atheist"? After all, he isn't claiming there is evidence for God, just evidence that religion has some benefits for humans.

And so does atheism, even more so, based on evidence not fantasies. So what did he really accomplish here beside, to those who don't know him, coming across as one who is tryin to take a bite off Dawkins' pie?

Possibly, but before you have a case, you need to establish that atheists are more in touch with reality than religious people are. What's your evidence for that? They believe in God? The existance of God is not factually established one way or the other, so that isn't a convincing argument (at least not to this agnostic) that religious people are less in touch with reality than athiests.

Like Dawkins said in a CNN interview, theists believe they will have another chance at life after they die, consequently they live the present one in a deflated state missing out on what more they could have accomplished. In respect to the delusions about god, atheists are well ahead and more in touch with reality than one can conceive. There is a book written by a certain Smith that's titled History of god:... it disects all paganic practices that proceeded the christian era, and from which many aspects of chrisitianity have been basically duplicated. One could browse the net and see what's there to read in regard to the subject. There is an incredible wealth of literature that would open one's eyes if they are willing to search and look.

Wilson has been taking a look around. He's actually done research in the area. That's his point. The evidence does not support the type of wholesale condemnation that you and Dawkins make regarding religion.

Your friend needs to get out more. Again, like Dawkins said in his book, the 'nice ones' pave the way or make it easier for the extremists to thrive in their sickness since those are the ones that cause the irreparable harm. If you haven't read TGD, you might want to do so, it's an eye opener. Between Dawkins' and Hitchens latest books, the truth about how bad things really are out there is unmistakable. This is how problems and crisis get resolved. By first being exposed by the likes of these 2 Gentlemen. Things don't get better by one sweeping problems under the rug, sitting on it while pretending everything is swell. That's the theist way. Perhaps this is why theists seem "happy" and atheists anxious: theists are ablivious and cluless while atheists are awake and alert.

 

[andyandy]

ok just one more post....

None of those citations was available alas. He had an opinion and pointed to stuff to justify it. I can post similar walls of pedigreed opinion but I don't think you would swallow it without seeing the data, nor should you.

just to follow up some of the cites, they're peer reviewed scientific studies. You should be prepared to at least address the findings rather than simply pretending that the evidence doesn't exist.

cite 24

Abstract
We use recently released, nationally representative data from the National Health Interview Survey-Multiple Cause of Death linked file to model the association of religious attendance and sociodemographic, health, and behavioral correlates with overall and cause-specific mortality. Religious attendance is associated with U.S. adult mortality in a graded fashion: People who never attend exhibit 1.87 times the risk of death in the follow-up period compared with people who attend more than once a week. This translates into a seven-year difference in life expectancy at age 20 between those who never attend and those who attend more than once a week. Health selectivity is responsible for a portion of the religious attendance effect: People who do not attend church or religious services are also more likely to be unhealthy and, consequently, to die. However, religious attendance also works through increased social ties and behavioral factors to decrease the risks of death. And although the magnitude of the association between religious attendance and mortality varies by cause of death, the direction of the association is consistent across causes.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0070-3370(199905)36:2<273:RIAUAM>2.0.CO;2-H


cite 25

A Longitudinal Study of Religiosity and Mortality Risk
Kathleen M. Clark
Department of Psychology, University of California, USA

Howard S. Friedman

Department of Psychology, University of California, USA

Leslie R. Martin

Department of Psychology, La Sierra University, USA

The relation of adult religiosity to longevity was studied in 993 participants from Terman's 70-year Life-Cycle Study. Key social and behavioral variables of physical health, psychological well-being, socio-economic status, social support, and health behaviors were also considered. Results indicate that women who viewed themselves as more religious in adulthood (approximately age 40) had a lower risk for premature mortality than those who were less religiously inclined. These women had healthier behaviors, more positive feelings about their futures, and reported being somewhat happier than their less religiously inclined peers. In this bright, middle-class, 20th century sample, religiosity among women seems to be part of a generally healthy lifestyle, but not necessarily a direct cause of it.

http://hpq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/3/381


cite 27

The perceived or self-reported degree of 'religiousness' was obtained by interview from 715 colorectal cancer patients and 727 age/sex matched community controls, as part of a large, comprehensive population-based study of colorectal cancer incidence, aetiology and survival (The Melbourne Colorectal Cancer Study) conducted in Melbourne, Australia. Self-reported or perceived 'religiousness', as defined in the study, was a statistically significant protective factor [relative risk (RR) = 0.70, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.6-0.9, P = 0.002]. This statistically significant protection remained after the previously determined major risk factors found in the study, namely a family history of colorectal cancer, dietary risk factors, beer consumption, number of children and age at birth of the first child, were statistically corrected for (P = 0.004). There was no association between Dukes' staging of the cancer and perceived degree of 'religiousness' (P = 0.42). Although self-reported or perceived 'religiousness' was associated with a median survival time of 62 months compared with 52 months in those self-reporting as being 'non-religious', this difference was not statistically significant (P = 0.64).

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1294223

cite 28

David B. Larson1, 7, Harold G. Koenig2, Berton H. Kaplan3, Raymond S. Greenberg4, Everett Logue5 and Herman A. Tyroler6

(1) Biometrics and Clinical Applications Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Maryland
(2) The Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina
(3) Department of Epidemiology School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, USA
(4) Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia
(5) College of Medicine at Northeastern Ohio University in Rootstown, Ohio
(6) Department of Epidemiology School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
(7) Present address: BCAB/DBAS/NIMH, Rm., 18c-14, 5600 Fishers Lane, 20857 Rockville, MD


Abstract Most clinical studies examining the relation between religion and blood pressure status have focused on church attendance, finding lower pressures among frequent attenders. The present study examines the effect on blood pressure status of a religious meaning variable, importance of religion, both by itself and together with frequency of church attendance. The relation between blood pressure, self-perceived importance of religion, and frequency of church attendance was examined among a rural sample of 407 white men free from hypertension or cardiovascular disease. The data confirmed an interaction between the effects of both religious variables on blood pressure status, with importance of religion having an even greater association with lower pressures than church attendance. Diastolic blood pressures of persons with high church attendance and high religious importance were significantly lower than those in the low attendance, low importance group. These differences persisted after adjusting the analyses for age, socioeconomic status, smoking, and weight-height ratio (Quetelet Index). The difference in mean diastolic pressures based on response to the religious importance variable alone was statistically and clinically significant, particularly among men aged 55 and over (6 mm) and among smokers (5 mm). These findings suggest that both religious attitudes and involvement may interact favorably in their effects on cardiovascular hemodynamics.
Funding for this study was provided by the Department of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Duke University Medical Center; and the Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center, Durham, North Carolina.
The authors thank Dan Blazer for his advice, assistance, and encouragement. They are also grateful to Dana Anne Mlekush for her help with manuscript preparation and her thoughtful input to this project.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g484435055217w1p/

and no this is not an appeal to "a wall of opinion." they require addressing if you genuinely wish to discuss this area with any semblance of objectivity.

 

[Meadmaker]

You mean religion is your mother? ...if that's the case, it used to be my mother too, so I speak from experience.

I think you understand what I was getting at, though. When you use words like "poisonous", you are insulting a fair number of intelligent, rational, good people who happen to be religious.

Wilson cannot tell me anything about myself that I already don't know.

In my opinion, though, he can tell you something about some people you don't know.

how is constantly living in the clouds about how one is gonna go to heaven after they die, ...., added to the rest of the paganic junk that is known to fill a believer's head, is supposed to be a good sane way of bringing about happiness into one's own life?

Based on the empirical data available, apparently it is.

The reason I think this is important is that I think we, as atheists, need to recognize what it is that gives religious people the benefits that they get. I'm guessing that it isn't religion itself that provides the extra happiness, longer lives, or other apparent benefits of religion, but if we deny that those benefits exist, in the face of overwhelming evidence that they do, there's no way we can achieve those benefits for ourselves and the atheistic subculture in our society.

Somehow, we have to understand what's so good about religion, so that we can achieve the benefits without having to succumb to beliefs that, appealing as they might be, are actually false.

yet this man seems to think I am less happy now than I was when i believed. His study is useless and irrelevant.

He said nothing of the sort. He did say that the average unbeliever was less happy than the average believer. I doubt that he knows you, or even knows of you.

 

[Beth]

Meadmaker addressed a lot of your points already, so I'm going to skip responding to anything he's already answered better than I could.

He said "happy". What does that mean?...and I say "happy" is not all there is. Happy is an end result that one can reach through various routes of which not all are safe and responsible as the above example shows. Ask a drug user how happy they are while high and record how extatic they are at that very moment. And speaking about "illegal" vs. legal, alcohol is legal, pot is legal in California, prostitution is legal in Holland. The legality of religion does not legitimize it as the social disease it is.

Referring to religion as a 'social disease' is pretty strong language. Especially for something, that as near as I can tell, generally helps people live healthier happier lives than those who are not religious.

And you're right, happiness is not all there is. In fact, it isn't top of the list for most religions. Happiness, in many ways, is an oddly elusive goal. Oddly enough, it is the reason most drug addicts get started and yet, I suspect end up leading pretty miserable lives. Religion usually tries to redirect people's attention away from their own happiness and towards others. And yes, from the empirical evidence available, religious believers end up happier. Yes, that's a terrible social disease we should all avoid contracting.

and I am supposed to just take his word for it (as I said, I've been there)? just who is he? jesus? I don't believe that for a single sec. And even it it were, how is constantly living in the clouds about how one is gonna go to heaven after they die, and how satan is around the corner waiting to embush them, how god is stalking them on second basis, added to the rest of the paganic junk that is known to fill a believer's head, is supposed to be a good sane way of bringing about happiness into one's own life?

Such beliefs are not necessary for religions to have benefits. In fact, they might well be detrimental. Not all religions believe such things.

Richard Dawkins showed me few basic simple verifiable demonstrable elements that effectively contributed to zaping out the god mosquito out of my head's surroundings. And I owe him for it. Prior to that, I struggeled for years. Even after I've done some reading to help me get out, I still kept on going back and forth. The way I see it, his book was not written for people like Sloan, but for the masses, the commoners, people like me. He Dddarn did an Outstanding Job!

Dr. Dawkins has written a rebuttal to Wilson's review of his book. You might want to check it out. He doesn't disput Wilson's findings. He just feels that wasn't the point of his book.

I am not going to agree either just so someone doesn't get their feelings hurt in the process. I am not talking about you here, neither would I agree unless what is being said makes total sense to me. See?

You don't have to agree with someone to avoid hurting their feelings. But you don't have to describe the fundamental values in life as 'poisonous no exceptions' or a 'social disease' either. It's possible to disagree and be respectful of others at the same time.

theists expect you to just agree no matter how much b s they hit you with.

Not the ones I hang out with. I suspect you just aren't noticing all the ones who aren't in your face and evangelizing.

Your friend needs to get out more. Again, like Dawkins said in his book, the 'nice ones' pave the way or make it easier for the extremists to thrive in their sickness since those are the ones that cause the irreparable harm. If you haven't read TGD, you might want to do so, it's an eye opener. Between Dawkins' and Hitchens latest books, the truth about how bad things really are out there is unmistakable. This is how problems and crisis get resolved. By first being exposed by the likes of these 2 Gentlemen. Things don't get better by one sweeping problems under the rug, sitting on it while pretending everything is swell. That's the theist way. Perhaps this is why theists seem "happy" and atheists anxious: theists are ablivious and cluless while atheists are awake and alert.

And perhaps there are other explanations for the differences. You might find "Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers" by Bruce E. Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer of interest. Their findings indicate that atheists are a rather grumpy, intelligent and independent group of people.

 

[The Atheist]

ok just one more post....

Only one more?

Crikey, mate, I've seen how many posts you have in this thread, utterly determined to break the ton!

Fascinating stuff!

In a little irony, I'd missed this thread and its import at a time when I'm doing some research on atheism vs religion from an evolutionary perspective. I was going to provisionally entitle a thread, "Atheism is anti-evolutionary".

This report seems to be another string to my hypothesis. I was more approaching from birth rates than happiness, but since I don't know of anything more important than happiness, this stuff is an interesting twist. Maybe the birth rates are a side-effect of the lack of happiness? (People are arguing the subjectivity of happiness? Wtf?) ["I did not have sexual relations with that woman"? Come on, happy is happy, I think we must all know when we're happy and when we aren't? That sort of crap looks like Strategic Defensive Misdirection 101.]

Despite a little venting from the Dawkins-is-god and the atheists-are-better-than-christians camps, this seems like a well-conducted piece of research and I'd find it hard to dispute findings from an anecdotal perspective. I've always maintained that it's easier to choose religion than not. If one chooses to believe in a god, it takes away all the metaphysical questions we beat ourselves up with.

Sorry I can't add too many posts to the count, because I pretty much agree with how you've handled it so far.

I shall, as always, plagiarise the crap out of you and your research! A hearty vote of thnks will be asked for at the next AGM.

Cheers

 

[The Atheist]

Their findings indicate that atheists are a rather grumpy, intelligent and independent group of people.

Makes a hard sell even harder.

 

[MrFrankZito]

Richard Dawkins does not need to be open-minded about, or tolerant of, a superstitious cabal which believes in human parthenogenesis.

 

[The Atheist]

Ok.

Interestingly, here's a christian scientist's opinion on group selection:

To evolutionary biologists (and to no-one else) mention of "group selection" inevitably reminds us of a spat we had back in the 1940s and 1950s. The notion of "group selection" was popular back then, and it was thoroughly debunked by David Lack (notoriously grumpy Anglo-Catholic) in the 1950s. Disbelieving in group selection is almost an entry condition of being in the mainstream of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis, and in particular the hard-headed British branch of it that includes Fisher and Lack and Hamilton and now Dawkins.

Group selection almost certainly almost never happens. ("Almost" because biology is not physics -there are no absolute laws or impossible things, merely strong tendencies and improbable things - biology is about statistics not equations). When someone thinks they have found it they are more or less invariably wrong, or else they have mistaken kinship selection or species selection (both of which are real) for group selection (which isn't)

So, if we throw out the group selection idea, we're obviously back to a form of determinism, where the level of intelligence tends people towards grumpiness and atheism?

 

[The Atheist]

Richard Dawkins does not need to be open-minded about, or tolerant of, a superstitious cabal which believes in human parthenogenesis.

Unfortunately, being wrong about one thing (god) doesn't disqualify scientists from being right on other matters.

 

[Anacoluthon64]

They were using a rating system based on the words given - and thus if you wish to pursue this argument it does require a significantly different interpretation of the given words.

You keep insisting that the difference in meaning must be significant. It doesn't. Communication does not consist solely of words, and assigning point-values to different words and phrases is fraught with difficulties because different people use these linguistic elements in subtly different ways in different contexts. Again I ask: how do you propose to distinguish the degree of happiness felt by two people both of whom say, "I'm extremely happy right now?" Because if anything is certain, it is that these two people have no basis on which they can compare their internal experience, so it would be fraudulent to say that they are in actual fact equally happy.

but this fails to explain the significant difference over thousands of data sets

How so? If it is a fairly consistent trait that believers and non-believers use words slightly differently and the scoring system is such that (by design or accident) it tends to accentuate such a difference, then it very well could explain the results – in fact, the more observations, the more statistically significant the differences will appear. Besides, it was meant much more to illustrate a point, rather than explain anything.

and in any case as i mentioned before, a person's perception of happiness is their happiness.

Indeed, but their expression of it is not identical to either that perception or the thing perceived.

It is necessarily subjective but that does not preclude the possibility of comparing individuals' measures.

If by "comparing measures" you mean that these measures are verifiably objective and can therefore be validly compared, then it is you who is making a very, very remarkable claim.

Again you're just dismissing the actual significant results of the survey.

I'm doing no such thing. And please stop distorting what I'm saying.

If this yardstick was of no meaning then how do you explain the significant differences exhibited between different groups?

Certainly not by jumping to the unwarranted conclusion "that religion is beneficial to believers," which, without sharpening up what "beneficial" is supposed to mean, isn't even a scientific hypothesis to begin with. As pointed out, there are many possibilities that could explain why believers describe themselves (or seem to) as more happy than non-believers. Maybe they are on the whole more sociable and perk up more readily when someone asks them how they feel. Moreover, chicken pox is immunologically "beneficial" to children. About the best that can be said about the study's results is that they do not run counter to said hypothesis.

It would appear to me the more likely given the more remarkable claims required for the alternative explanations.

That is your opinion, which you're perfectly entitled to.

But, in case you hadn't noticed it, you're adding some weight to the very point you're contesting.

'Luthon64

 

[The Atheist]

Moreover, chicken pox is immunologically "beneficial" to children.

Oh please do back this up (or at least attempt to).

If that's the quality of your reasoning, you are in the deep stuff.

 

[Darat]

Oh please do back this up (or at least attempt to).

If that's the quality of your reasoning, you are in the deep stuff.

Well it does have one - you are unlikely to get chicken pox when you are an adult.....

(And as someone who had chicken pox as an adult I'd much rather have had that annoying brat "I" was when "I" was a kid suffer than me! ETA unless of course it would have meant he died or I'd be left with serious medical complications because his immune system was crappy.)

 

[Anacoluthon64]

Oh please do back this up (or at least attempt to).

Sure thing:

Following primary infection there is usually lifelong protective immunity from further episodes of chickenpox.

Also, did you perhaps miss the inverted commas around beneficial?

If that's the quality of your reasoning, you are in the deep stuff.

If that's the quality of your perspicacity, …

'Luthon64

 

[The Atheist]

Well it does have one - you are unlikely to get chicken pox when you are an adult.....

Obviously, that point is quite correct.

Sure thing:Also, did you perhaps miss the inverted commas around beneficial?

It is, however, extensively outweighed by the lifelong likelihood of contracting further non-chicken-pox herpes complaints such as the far more-dangerous and painful shingles, which is why there is nowadays a chicken-pox vaccine, neatly removing both threats. Note that only people who have had chicken-pox are susceptible to it.

You might like to double-click on that "beneficial".

Normally, the varicella virus lies dormant and does not cause health problems. But if the immune system, which normally protects the body against infection, is weakened the virus can reactivate. When reactivated, it causes shingles, which can be more serious than chickenpox.

link

 

[Meadmaker]

You keep insisting that the difference in meaning must be significant. It doesn't. Communication does not consist solely of words, and assigning point-values to different words and phrases is fraught with difficulties because different people use these linguistic elements in subtly different ways in different contexts. Again I ask: how do you propose to distinguish the degree of happiness felt by two people both of whom say, "I'm extremely happy right now?" Because if anything is certain, it is that these two people have no basis on which they can compare their internal experience, so it would be fraudulent to say that they are in actual fact equally happy.

Certainly it is difficult to define happiness, and measuring it is even more difficult. Certainly if someone comes out with a study that "proves" X makes people happy, one needs to ask a lot of questions and make sure there isn't some sort of experimental bias.

However, consider the possibility that the apparent happiness of believers, measured several times in several different ways, is an artifact of faulty measurement and the inability to define happiness. Surely there would be a different measure of happiness that would show nonbelievers to be just as happy. After all, these studies have claimed to be able to distinguish levels of happiness. If what we were dealing with was measurement error, we ought to be able to find a different way of measuring that produced a different result.

I've been reading these boards for a few years now, and have been directed to a lot of different studies that all showed similar findings. Religious people tend to be happier and healthier than non-religious people. Wilson's writings are just one more example of a phenomenon that's pretty well documented.

I think it's a challenge to atheists to find out why that is, and, furthermore, attempt to duplicate it. I think we are all willing to rule out the possibility that the Holy Spirit has filled their souls with joy, but what else is there, and can it be separated from the actual beliefs which we do not share?

 

[andyandy]

This report seems to be another string to my hypothesis. I was more approaching from birth rates than happiness, but since I don't know of anything more important than happiness, this stuff is an interesting twist. Maybe the birth rates are a side-effect of the lack of happiness?

I agree birth rates would be very interesting - as close as i could find was a much greater chance of being single (33%) compared to the average (~20%) - for non-religious.

see page 28 of the pdf
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris.pdf

this itself would need more analysis, maybe the elderly lose faith when their partner dies? Also there is likely to be some young person skew of non-religious which i presume is higher than national average.....nevertheless the difference is stark and I'd find it surprising if such considerations could satisfactorily account for it....

The ARIS report (referenced above) has a whole stack of population studies re religion that are worth reading

(you can read a discussion on the methodology of the study, and also get to the study via here )