EDIN May 3, 2009

Science and Religion/ what they have to offer

Charles M Low New York Times may 3, 2009

.......... that wondrous,20 precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It’s the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs affirmation and fellowship.
We are more than cells, synapses and sex drives. We are amazing, mysterious creatures forever in search of something greater than ourselves.
Dale McGowan, the co-author and editor of the book “Parenting Beyond Belief” told me that he believes that most of these people “are not looking for a dogma or a doctrine, but for transcendence from the everyday.”
Churches, mosques and synagogues nurture and celebrate this. Being regularly surrounded by a community that shares your convictions and reinforces them through literature, art and ritual is incredibly powerful, and yes, spiritual.
The nonreligious could learn a few things from religion.

Returning to Sabbath London Times may 3, 2009
Twenty years of a seven-day-a-week consumer culture has not made Britons measurably happier. Not surprisingly, because the world of salvation-by-shopping depends on advertising making us all too conscious of what we lack. If only we had this watch, that suit, this car, that mobile phone, our pleasure would be complete, at least until tomorrow, when we discover the next thing we do not yet have. The financial meltdown was caused, at least in part, by people spending money they did not have to buy things they did not need to find a happiness that does not last. The consumer culture is, in fact, a remarkably efficient system for the production and distribution of discontent.
We cannot bring back the Sabbath to the public domain, but we can bring it back to our private lives. We need to because neither the environment nor the economy can be predicated on limitless growth, fed by artificial desire.
One day in seven we should give thanks for what we have and open our eyes to the radiance of the world.
Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks is Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
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God and Homer Simpson London Times may 3, 2009
......evangelicals are doing rather well for themselves. There seems to be a link between religiosity and upward economic mobility in the US. That is partly because the heartland of evangelical America, the South, has been booming. There is also considerable evidence that, regardless of wealth, Christians are healthier and happier than their secular brethren. David Hall, a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, maintains that weekly church attendance can add two to three years to your life. A 1997 study of 7,000 older people by the Duke University Medical Centre found that religious observance might enhance immune systems and lower blood pressure. In 1992 there were only three medical schools in the United States that had programmes examining the relationship between spirituality and health; by 2006, the number had increased to 141.
One of the most striking results of the Pew Forum's regular survey of happiness is that Americans who attend religious services once or more a week are happier (43 per cent very happy) than those who attend monthly or less (31 per cent) or seldom or never (26 per cent). White evangelical Protestants of the Flanders variety are more likely to report being very happy than white mainline Protestants: 43 per cent compared with 33 per cent. The correlation between happiness and church attendance has been fairly steady since Pew started the survey in the 1970s; it is also more robust than the link between happiness and wealth. Attending church weekly, r ather than not at all, has the same effect on people's reported happiness as moving from the bottom quartile to the top quartile of income distribution - and is a lot easier to do.
Religion can combat bad behaviour as well as promote wellbeing. Twenty years ago, Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, found that black youths who attend church were more likely to attend school and less likely to commit crimes or use drugs. Since then, a host of further studies, including the bipartisan 1991 National Commission on Children, have concluded that religious participation is associated with lower rates of crime and drug use. JamesQ.Wilson, perhaps America's pre-eminent criminologist, summarises a mountain of evidence from the social sciences succinctly: “Religion, independent of social class, reduces deviance.”
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Phil and Jo Ann Edin