God: No magic required

[Angrboda]

For starters, people want citations for the peer reviewed research indicating greater happiness and longer life expectancies for spiritual/religious people, as opposed to pure secularists.

http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/sp...ive-longer

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1305900/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19949046

Citing these studies in support of being religious is an example of the fallacy known as cum hoc, ergo propter hoc, that because one thing occurs in the presence of another, the one is a cause of the other. As any properly educated individual knows, correlation does not imply causation. This is because both of the correlated phenomena may be the result of a third confounding factor, and in this case, there is a readily identifiable one, namely, the absence of minority stress.

Wikipedia has this to say about minority stress:

Minority stress describes chronically high levels of stress faced by members of stigmatized minority groups. It may be caused by a number of factors, including poor social support and low socioeconomic status, but the most well understood causes of minority stress are interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. Indeed, numerous scientific studies have shown that minority individuals experience a high degree of prejudice, which causes stress responses (e.g., high blood pressure, anxiety) that accrue over time, eventually leading to poor mental and physical health. Minority stress theory summarizes these scientific studies to explain how difficult social situations lead to chronic stress and poor health among minority individuals. It is an important concept for psychologists and public health officials who seek to understand and reduce minority health disparities.

(emphasis mine)

Since being a minority, and according to studies one of the most hated minorities, can itself account for the differential health outcome, your attempt to attribute it to being an effect of being religious is premature and fallacious.

Now, someone else suggested that (1) not every single US study has shown this to be the case and (2) some studies of third world countries have shown the opposite. With regard to #2, it's an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think that divine intervention is responsible for the longevity and mental health advantages to spirituality and religion. I don't know the literature for third world countries, where a large majority of the population is very poor. Perhaps the secularists in these countries belong to higher socioeconomic classes. Perhaps there are requirements unique to, for example, Islam which are potentially harmful to health (Ramadan fasting, followed by gorging, for example). What's relevant to this particular thought experiment is the population of people living in the USA, because that's the population in the studies I cited. I can safely assert that the preponderance of peer-review medical literature supports the advantages of spirituality/religion with respect to both longevity and happiness.

Choosing which studies to consider significant after the fact due to specifics which have nothing to do with whether or not the result is representative of the general class is an inappropriate procedure. Informally this is referred to as cherry picking, but it's an example of what is known as an inappropriate selection bias, and any results tainted by that bias must simply be dismissed.



You claim to be good at analyzing scientific data, yet so far, all I can see is that you're a biased and incompetent douche bag.