The Value of Religion

Institutional religion is declining, at least in America. More and more people identify themselves as unaffiliated to any religion or describe their religion as "nothing in particular."

Could this be a movement towards enlightenment? People are becoming more aware that religion can be a choice, not just something you are born into; and they are questioning that choice. Frequently these days, the prevalent opinion is that religion as an idea is a  relic and pretty irrelevant today. We don't need religion and its unnecessary, meaningless and sometimes hilarious practices. A popular perception about religion, and not just in the vocal atheist sections of society,  is that it is a regressive institution, a largely negative idea. Many ideas and practices in organized religions are indeed outdated and downright bigoted.

Religious adherents on the other hand claim that there is a sound basis for many of the practices. This is seen in Hinduism, and the explanations range from the symbolic to the scientific. Similar claims about scientific knowledge exist in Islam and other faiths. This has now been parodied a lot and even gave rise to a recent controversy involving Richard Dawkins. Quite apart from its symbolism and practices, religion has found some support from at least one contemporary thinker for its ideas and pedagogy..

So it was fascinating to read about evidence in support of some religious practices, practices which could otherwise be characterized as part of the supposed collective brainwashing in religious teachings. (The debate about whether Buddhism and Hinduism encourage people to think, question and debate ideas rather than restrict themselves to a singular dogma is a different topic and  can't be covered here. Perhaps later.)

In their book Willpower, Roy Baumeister and John Tierney describe how experiments have found that certain religious practices and beliefs are useful in conditioning and building up a person's willpower, in addition to many other benefits.

Any sort of religious activity increases your longevity, according to the psychologist Michael McCullough...he looked at more than three dozen studies that had asked people about their religious devotion and then kept track of them over time. It turned out that the nonreligious people died off sooner, and that at any given point, a religiously active person was 25 % more likely than a nonreligious person to remain alive. That's a pretty hefty difference...that result (published in 2000) has since been confirmed by other researchers.

Why would this be?

 [social scientists] have found more earthly causes. Religious people are less likely than others to develop unhealthy habits, like getting drunk, engaging in risky sex, taking illicit drugs, and smoking cigarettes. They're more likely to wear seat belts, visit a dentist and take vitamins. They have (and I think this is the clincher) better social support, and their faith helps them cope psychologically with misfortunes. And they have better self-control,... [this was] recently concluded after analyzing hundreds of studies of religion and self control over eight decades. ...Religion promotes family values and social harmony, in part because some values gain in importance by being supposedly linked to God's will or other religious values. Less obvious benefits included the finding that religion reduces people's inner conflicts among different goals and values.....conflicting goals impede self-regulation, so it appears that religion reduces such problems by providing believers with clearer priorities. More important,religion affects two central mechanisms for self-control: building willpower and improving monitoring.

Baumeister and Tierney go on to explain that last point in detail - how prayers and meditation help build mental discipline, how practices like having to pray five times a day (Islam), fasting (Yom Kippur Lent, Ramadan and the many Hindu fasts) , specific patterns of eating (kosher, vegetarianism), adopting and holding specific poses (kneeling or sitting cross legged) are uncomfortable and require discipline to maintain them. As for monitoring, they argue that "religious people tend to feel that someone important is watching them". As most of us must've experienced at some point, our behavior is more righteous and proper when we know we are being observed by others. Religious rituals also encourage monitoring through rituals such as confession and Yom Kippur- that "require people to reflect on their moral failures and other shortcomings". (Perhaps Thanksgiving might be added to this list.)

Since these practices require a certain level of discipline to begin with, there is a likelihood that people who are religious actually start out with higher self-control than average. However, even after statistically accounting for this possibility, the evidence points out that self-control improves with religion.

Interestingly, the book points out that people did not get this benefit of self-control when they attend religious services for extrinsic reasons - like wanting to impress others or make connections.

Behavioral research also points out another benefit of religion - less cheating. In one of his many experiments about dishonesty and cheating, Prof. Dan Ariely and his team from Duke University showed how priming (where they expose participants to a stimulus that alters their behavior as a result) people with a reminder about being honest and not cheating before a test actually resulted in less cheating. This is fascinating because simply a reminder to not cheat (whether through a call to conscience, a simple reminder or the idea that God is watching you and His commandments forbid you from cheating) resulted in less cheating.  This priming need not be religious in nature, but in the real world, it often is. Obviously, with many godmen and churches involved in corruption and very lurid scandals, this connection between honesty and cheating might be hard to believe. One could argue however, as mentioned above, that those who participate in religion for external reasons do not experience the same benefits as those who do it with genuine belief. Thus, the religious people who do indulge in criminal acts might not be into the religion for their beliefs.

The conflict between religion and atheism (and within different religions) is only going to get starker. Whatever happens on the global stage, it is certain that many of us have a choice at an individual level to take sides on this. Information like this will certainly help me to make my choices, how about you?