Today
is Day Three of Week Six of the Omer. That is Thirty-seven Days of the
Omer. The Theme continues to be Happiness.
Two days ago, I cited one of a raft of
studies done in recent years, that conclude that the more one is involved in
religious life, the Happier one is likely to be. The specific study I cited, done by the Austin
Institute of Family and Culture with its finding released in 2014, showed a
significant, direct relationship between increased religious participation and
increased Happiness. A number of other
studies have reached similar conclusions.
The exact causality cannot be pinned down by the research done to date,
but the correlation is undeniable.
This is, of course counter to a
popular image of religious people as dour, judgmental, and joyless. Now I’m not contesting that there are dour, judgmental,
and joyless religious people out there, but my anecdotal experience suggests
that secular people are more likely to be dour, judgmental, and joyless, than
religious people. And I’m not talking
just about Jews; thanks to my experience on the religious divide, I can say with
confidence that the more religion/more Happiness correlation holds for people
in virtually all the religious traditions, whose adherents I’ve encountered.
But if greater likelihood of happiness
is not enough of a motivator to be more religious, maybe this is: religious people live longer.
This, as concluded this year after a
16-year study of American women by the Harvard School of Public Health. Although the study might seem limited in
scope because it only included middle aged to elderly professional women, the
number of subjects examined – some 75,000 – makes its results relatively immune
to anomalies.
What did the study find? Those who attended religious services regularly
(~once a week) died during the survey period at a rate of 33% less than those
who did not. In particular, the
religious women were 27% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease, and 21%
from cancer. The survey did not show
that the religious women were less likely to get cardiovascular disease
of cancer, which they got at rates that were not significantly different from
those of the non-religious women. The
difference was in the likelihood of death from the conditions in question.
Once again the data do not prove causality,
the only correlate the two factors:
religiosity and mortality. But the
differences in death rates, and the size of the population studied, suggest
that there is a clear relationship between the two.
Our chances of living to a ripe old
age are not a factor that most of us consider when deciding how religious a
life we’re going to live. But perhaps it
should figure into our decisions.
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