(December 1, 2014 at 3:04 am)Aractus Wrote:(November 30, 2014 at 11:05 am)Cato Wrote: Are you arguing that being dead isn't an adverse health condition? Or are you just dismissing facts that don't support your conclusion?"My conclusion"? I'm simply quoting from the experts (well a government literature review which itself examined the evidence provided by experts).
Do you have opposing literature you wish to post?
I don't need to post any additional literature, yours will suffice. Did you actually read it?
Pg.18: This 'study' explicitly ignores negative health impacts associated with religious based oppression of women, attitudes towards the LBGT community, attitudes relative to the use of contraceptives, or religions being the source of religious discrimination.
Quote: All of these factors can in turn influence health. However, this study did not explore the evidence linked to these broader debates. For this reason, it does not provide a basis for drawing conclusions about the ‘net benefits’ of religious belief to health at the population level.
The paper is a review of reviews. The authors admit that they found only 10 studies with at least one religious discrimination factor and at least one health related component. The authors also admit that the reviewed literature centered on Muslim Australian discrimination and to a lesser extent Australian anti-Semitism.
Quote:Given the small number of studies retrieved in relation to religious discrimination and health, as well as the previously noted overlap between religious discrimination and race-based discrimination, this component of the literature review was supplemented with evidence from the larger body of literature on race-based discrimination (or racism) and health.
Did you catch that? The authors had trouble finding meaningful studies regarding religion and health so they dipped into studies that specifically addressed race-based discrimination. Seriously?
I then went to sample the summaries of the referenced studies in Appendix A. It listed 'religious purification' as a positive religious coping strategy, but we already know that the study ignored the impact of such purification strategies (pray the gay away) on individual mental health. Demonic reappraisal was listed as a negative coping strategy. My other observation was that the referenced studies themselves seemed to all be literature reviews or meta-analysis. I'll have to give this more thought, but I immediately recalled the errors associated with taking the average of averages.
Then there's the matter of how the authors define religion:
Quote:[R]eligion and belief should be given a wide meaning, covering the broad spectrum of personal convictions and matters of conscience. It should include theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs. It should include minority and non-mainstream religions and belief systems as well as those of a more traditional or institutionalised nature. Religion or belief
should be defined as a particular collection of ideas and/or practices
Adopting such a wide definition of religion renders the distinction almost meaningless (keep in mind that they borrowed heavily from race-based discrimination studies). It would take pouring through the referenced studies, but early in the paper there was a table that indicated that the discrimination was self-reported. What does this mean? Was a person actually prevented from practicing religion? Or were their feelings hurt because somebody considered his/her particular brand of worship to be stupid? Don't forget that the study ignored the impact of religious intolerance as the basis for discrimination.
The argument in the paper you linked isn't very compelling.
