Religion, part of human existence

"Humanity does not enter the future empty-handed. Each community in the modern world brings to tomorrow the baggage of yesterday-the debates, insignts, and allegiances of past centuries. Central to that legacy is religion." World Religions Western Traditions edited by Willard Oxtoby

Religion is very powerful expression of human psyche. Like emotions and feelings, it can either benefit or undermine your basic humanity. We must understand the origin of religious consciousness in order to deal with the side effects of religion in human behavior. Primitive peoples develop the skills of coping with hostile world they lived in, and out of that came Culture and cult. We become thinking reed. We seem to learn compared to others in the animal kingdom, the art of thinking, creativity, and reasoning in order to face the reality of sufferings, death, and tragedy around us. All our emotions and responses to our surroundings are there to keep us well-balanced creatures. Our reactions to our surroundings are driven with intense desire to deal with pain and sufferings. The moment we feel the air of sustenance and existence, the aspiration to thrive generates complex growth of human life that reaches a higher plane. The arts and creativity of human species are by product of our human constitution, and thus we may assert that even our own biology, may have brought about this conscieousness against the backrop of life itself in the universe. Hence, the capacity of religion as an expression of art and logic is built itself within the neurophysical state of human being.
The complexity of our brain and its evolutionary creation points to a result of long process of interaction with our environment in order to have a balance existence. We think, we act, and we evolve because the outside world influences our inner world both metaphysically and physiologically. Religion as recognized by many modern scientists lies within the brain of homo sapiens.
Among all the primates we have taken the strengths of almost all animals, including our relatives i.e. plants in order to cope with our backgrounds and environments. However, we feel that we are both at the top and at the bottom of grand scale of life existence. Some of them have become both strong and weak. Like so many other things in life one can be both vulnerable and invicible. (Ariel P. Dumaran)



RELIGION AND HEALTH by Elizabeth De Vita- Raeburn
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For the last 15 years, scientists have been exploring whether there areconcrete health benefits associated with faith and prayer, a challengingcourse of study under the best of circumstances. What counts as a dose ofprayer? What if the person who is praying is faking it? I started going to Sunday school and church when I was 5. I stopped when Iwas 6. That’s when my older brother was diagnosed with a rare andincurable immune disorder that necessitated his living in a sterile“bubble” room at a hospital near our house. My mother proclaimed that nogod would have allowed that to happen. Even a 6-year-old could readbetween those lines. Either God didn’t exist, or He was an astral bully.My parents and I stopped attending church, and I dropped out of Sundayschool. And that was the end of anything approaching sanctioned religionor prayer in my life.Secretly, though, I remained fascinated by the rituals surroundingreligion and the fact that many of my friends appeared to be sure that Goddid exist and that the world was operating according to His plan. The kidsin my mostly Catholic neighborhood griped about the Christian educationclasses their parents forced them to attend, but surreptitiously, I enviedthem. Partly, I felt deprived of the camaraderie bred by the torture oftheir mutual obligation, but mostly I yearned for the certainty with whichmy friends believed, their seeming lack of doubt.I was a doubter. Not just of God but of my parents. I felt continuallytorn between a desire to emulate their biting disdain of all thingsreligious and my fear that we were missing out on something important.After all, my religious friends and their parents didn’t strike me asstupid. What if my parents were wrong? Someone had to be in error, and Ivery much didn’t want it to be us. Because if it was us, what magic, whatadvantage, what peace of mind were we potentially giving up? And whatfurther retribution were we risking from a god who had already picked onmy older brother?So I went with friends and their families to church or synagogue if Ihappened to be staying over when they were going. Later, I’d sneak off tovarious churches in the neighborhood by myself. Once, I actually went upand took Communion. (When I told a Catholic friend about this, she wassure lightning would strike me.) Occasionally, I’d pray. Sometimes, it wasa mundane request: Please make it a snow day. Other times, when I wascaught in a dire spot — trying to buy beer with a fake ID, for instance —my prayers might be a little more urgent. But my brother’s death, when Iwas 14, ended my religious dabblings. Even if there was a god, I decided,I didn’t think much of Him or His plan. So I snubbed Him. As I grew older,my see-if-I-care position evolved into a more rueful atheism: I continuedto envy people who believed in God, who thought that their prayers had achance of being answered. These, it seemed to me, were happy delusionsthat could make the world feel a little safer. But I had never sharedtheir steadfast faith, and it was too late to talk myself into it now. And that’s pretty much where I’ve stood, until recently, when I startedhearing about research suggesting that faith, religion and prayer confer avariety of health benefits, from an increased life span to better odds ofconceiving to a reduced risk for depression. Once again, I found myselfquestioning my beliefs, or lack thereof, and envying those whose faithseemed to come so easily, like a summer cottage handed down from onegeneration to the next. I wanted something spiritual in my life. But howdo you “get” faith, with a family history like mine? You can’t magicallymuster it up out of nowhere. The closest I came to anything resemblingritual and spirituality in my life, I realized, was yoga. I go to classoften. I meditate and chant, which I enjoy, though I generally have noidea what I’m saying. The whole process makes me feel calm and serene, andI like being part of a community of people who also get pleasure out ofthese things. I appreciate that part of yoga is to learn to accept whereyou are rather than judging yourself or others.What yoga doesn’t do is give me faith that there is order in the world, ora sense that there is a god in control of things, who listens and mightaddress my complaints if I bothered to ask. Since 59 percent of Americanssay they pray at least once a day and 22 percent say they do it at leastonce a week, it’s tough not to wonder — still — what I’m missing. And so Idecided to investigate faith’s perks, much as I did as a child, except Ididn’t take Communion this time.For the last 15 years, more and more scientists have been exploringwhether there are concrete health benefits associated with faith andprayer, a challenging (if not impossible) course of study under the bestof circumstances. Most difficult: Trying to quantify whether praying forsomeone — an act the experts refer to as “intercessory prayer” — actuallyhelps the person being prayed for. One major problem is that it’s tough tocontrol the “dose” of prayer that someone is getting (i.e., even if aperson is not assigned to a prayed-for group, her family, friends andchurch congregations could be slipping in a few prayers on the side). Thenthere is the question of how many prayers constitute a single dose, not tomention how to define a prayer — does anyone really pray the same way?Does it matter if the person praying for someone else isn’t of the samereligion? What if the person praying is faking or doesn’t truly have herheart in it — will that affect the outcome? And that’s merely a short listof the potential hurdles.Which is why only a few of the many intercessory prayer investigationsdone over the years are considered scientifically sound. One that is, a2005 study done at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, comparedheart patients who were being prayed for to a similar group that wasn’tbeing prayed for. The end result: no difference in their recovery orsurvival. A second 2006 study of cardiac bypass patients not only found nobenefits for the people being prayed for, but also revealed that folks whoknew prayers were being directed their way experienced more healthcomplications than people who weren’t getting prayers. “It simply hasn’tbeen a very fruitful area of research,” says Harold G. Koenig, M.D.,codirector of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at DukeUniversity Medical Center. “Then again, the scientific method wasn’tdeveloped to study supernatural phenomena.”One intercessory prayer study did show positive — and remarkable —effects: In 2001, The Journal of Reproductive Medicine reported that whenpeople prayed for a group of Korean women undergoing fertility treatments(who didn’t know they were being prayed for), the women conceived at twicethe rate as those who weren’t receiving any prayers. The findingsimmediately caused a sensation — and drew criticism. Skeptics questionedthe study’s methodology as well as the credentials of one of the studyauthors, whose degrees were in law and parapsychology. Then the leadauthor said he’d only consulted on the project months after the study hadbeen done, rather than head it up, which fomented more controversy.Yet all this doesn’t mean that praying is useless — far from it. Receivingsomeone else’s prayers may not have tangible benefits, at least in thescientifically quantifiable realm, but a person’s own faith and religioushabits can have a profound impact on her own health and emotionalwell-being. A nine-year study of more than 21,000 adults published inDemography in 1999 found that people who went to religious services morethan once a week lived an average of seven years longer than folks whodidn’t, results that held up after factors such as smoking and incomelevel were taken out of the equation. In a 28-year study of 5,000-pluspeople, those who attended some form of religious services at least once aweek were about 25 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t.Research also suggests that regular church attendance is linked with lowerblood pressure, less chronic pain, slower cognitive decline in olderadults and fewer symptoms of depression, among other benefits. One studyeven found a link between weekly church attendance and low blood levels ofinterleukin 6, a protein that, when present in high amounts, can indicatea weakened immune system.The question is: What causes those salubrious effects? Is God responsible?Or something else? With all due respect to God (assuming He exists), theexplanation may be less than supernatural. Dr. Koenig says he believesthat people who are part of a religious community are more likely toexperience the psychological windfalls of hope and purpose that come fromhearing sermons and singing and praying with others. They are also thebeneficiaries of added social support — say, having friends who bringgroceries or check in during trying times. Those are all clearlylife-extending ingredients. “We know that the mind and emotions have animpact on the immune and cardiovascular systems,” Dr. Koenig says. “So itstands to reason that religion and prayer would alter physiology as well.It makes more sense to study those benefits than to try to prove whether(intercessory prayer) works or God exists.”Getting and staying connected Wendy Lieber, 40, a lawyer and a mother of two in New York City, learnedjust how key community can be when, a year ago, her husband was in abiking accident that left him in a coma for five weeks. She and herhusband are Jewish and send their older son, who is 10, to a Jewish dayschool. “We’re not religious, but we really wanted him to have thatidentity, and we didn’t feel we could give it to him,” she explains.Still, she never expected the flood of support she experienced after theaccident. As soon as the school heard her husband was in the hospital,parents organized and took turns providing the family with dinner everynight for the entire five weeks. “Basically, anything we needed, we got,”Lieber says. “When my older son needed help with his homework, the schoolsent — and paid for — a tutor to come to our home. Another time, a mothershowed up and took my son, along with her own child, to the zoo.“I never considered myself someone who leans heavily on others,” Liebersays. “But we’ve never been part of this kind of community before. And wenever had a tragedy like that before.” The story has a happy ending:Lieber’s spouse fully recovered, and her family, she says, now fullyappreciates the benefit of being part of a community. “It was an amazinggift.” Another leg up enjoyed by the faithful: People who are religious andregularly attend some kind of services also tend to refrain from unhealthybehaviors such as smoking and heavy drinking, Dr. Koenig says. And,perhaps because they are more prone to being influenced by religiousdoctrine and the mores of their community, observant folks are less likelyto be promiscuous and have extramarital affairs — which helps protect themagainst sexually transmitted diseases. Being spiritually minded also appears to alleviate stress — which could explain why people with faith report having an easier time coping withlife’s trials. “Repetitive prayer, in and of itself, can be a potentstress reliever,” says cardiologist Herbert Benson, M.D., directoremeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine atMassachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His research shows thatmeditation — which can be similar to prayer — elicits something he callsthe relaxation response, the physiological counterpart to thefight-or-flight response (the telltale nervous system frenzy meant to helpus respond to immediate threats in our environment).Meditating or praying can be a good way of calming ourselves down, Dr.Benson explains, because they cause the reverse of the heart-pumpingfight-or-flight reaction. “The relaxation response is akin to a whole-bodyexhale. That release translates into a lower risk for all kinds ofstress-related ailments, including heart disease, high blood pressure,insomnia and infertility,” he says. “Many people pray when they’restressed, but yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises … all of these approachescan bring forth the same soothing result.”Dr. Benson gives patients a choice of techniques to elicit the relaxationresponse — “the crucial thing is for them to feel comfortable.” He askspatients to pick a word, sound or phrase they find meaningful, such as“peace on earth,” and to repeat and reflect on it while meditating. “Idon’t care what they choose, as long as they stick with it and it worksfor them. What’s most important is that they find a technique they believein and select words that conform to their individual belief system.”I’ve often wondered whether I would have had an easier time coping with mybrother’s illness and death if I had thought there was a reason to pray, aheaven waiting for him, where I might see him again someday. The studies,it seems, indicate that I might at least have felt a measure of comfort,or been calmer, had I been part of a religious community. But I wasn’t,and as an adult, I have to admit that I’ve done things like going to amedium, who assured me that my brother was still around and very much apart of my life. And, honestly, hearing that helped.Talking with Dr. Benson also helped. OK, so I don’t pray. I can’t pray. Inmy worldview, there isn’t anyone for me to pray to. But if there’s onething that yoga provides for me, it’s the chance to meditate. The chantingis a meditative act. And I find yoga itself to be a kind of meditation,simply because I’m generally so occupied with breathing and holding a posecorrectly that I can’t think about all the other worrying things that areon my mind. No wonder I generally feel so relaxed and happy after I leaveclass.Of course, I’ve been to yoga studios where people wouldn’t move their matan inch to accommodate a latecomer, competitive places that left mefeeling frazzled and out of sorts. But a few years ago, my husband, who isalso a yoga buff, and I discovered a place where the teachers know yourname. Tea and cookies are served in the foyer, so people stop and chatwith their fellow yogis. The school hosts teacher/student dinners atvarious restaurants around the city to foster community spirit. It’s kindof fun knowing all those kindred souls — people of all religiouspersuasions, I’m sure, who share the love of turning themselves inside outfor kicks. Where else in life do adults get to compliment one another ontheir headstands?“Spirituality means different things to different people,” affirms DanielDennett, Ph.D., codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at TuftsUniversity in Medford, Massachusetts. “For some, it’s World Cup soccer.But it’s possible for practically any intense human endeavor or culturalpreoccupation to be the focus of your spirituality.”If soccer can count, so can yoga. And, in truth, at this stage in my life,I’m probably happier doing yoga than with the idea of taking up religion.Yoga works for me. I go to class four or five times a week — more oftenthan most people go to church. I know many of the teachers by name, andthey know me. And while I don’t know all the people who line up on matsalongside me, I know their faces, and they know mine. In fact, the entirecommunity watched over my first pregnancy with the delight and concern ofan extended family. When I missed a class or two, people I knew and peopleI didn’t approached my husband to ask if we’d had the baby yet, and theysent their good wishes. That may not feel like church or a community tosome people, but it sure feels like it to me.