Is religion good for your health?

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 months 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

Science and religion, anyone? Come now, stifle those yawns. A paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B1 this week claims to offer a fresh perspective, with the startling suggestion that religion is a way to protect us from disease.

The general idea behind this theory — that religion is mainly a social construct — is actually much older than the authors, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, acknowledge. It harks back to classic works by two of sociology’s founding fathers, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, who, around the start of the twentieth century, offered explanations of how religions around the world have shaped and been shaped by the societies in which they are embedded.

According to this article, in addition to morality and order and other behavioral and "soft" benefits that a society may see, religion has another, more concrete result: Very religious societies tend to exclude outsiders. In this way, they avoid contracting new diseases.

However, the article also acknowledges that there's no solid way to tell the cause from the effect here. It might be that heightened religiosity causes insularity causes less disease or it might be that fear of disease causes insularity causes heightened religiosity.

Keywords: science and history history infectious diseases epidemiology epidemics human behavior spirituality science and religion religion health