Feeling healthy?

Why, yes, fit as a fiddle, actually. Why do you ask?

About Walter Olson

Fellow at a think tank in the Northeast specializing in law. Websites include overlawyered.com. Former columnist for Reason and Times Online (U.K.), contributor to National Review, etc.
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3 Responses to Feeling healthy?

  1. PatrickP says:

    I read something in New York Magazine this weekend that suggested that the health benefits of attending regular worship services had more to do with the sense of community and belonging. It was a very interesting article about human loneliness and whether or not people in place like NYC are really lonely.

  2. Heather Mac Donald says:

    If the belief in God is true, why does it matter whether it is also utilitarian? This recent “religion is good for your digestion” tack strikes me as rather wan. Conversely, just because a belief is utilitarian doesn’t make it true.

  3. Blode0322 says:

    @Heather Mac Donald
    You’ve raised an excellent point, and I wish I had a way to resolve it. My conundrum is, what if we need a certain utilitarian belief, but the belief isn’t provably true, and doubts about its veracity cause it to stop working?

    Put another way, what if Ms. Mac Donald, Mr. Derbyshire, this “Blode” character, and people of our ilk behave like absolute angels in the absence of religion, but others don’t? Do we risk pulling the behavioral “rug” out from people with different backgrounds if we raise doubts about religion per se? (I’m not questioning the need to correct religiously-derived misconceptions about fact, e.g. creation science or any of that. I’m just talking about the promotion of secularism over religion as a whole.)

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