The Atheism Diet

Amusing story this morning on MSNBC:

It might be the potlucks, it might be those long hours sitting in pews, but whatever the cause, a new study presented this week shows a link between religious activity and weight gain.

The study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University, found that young adults who frequently attended religious activities were far more likely to become obese than those who didn’t.

“Our main finding was that people with a high frequency of religious participation in young adulthood were 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age than those with no religious participation in young adulthood,” says Matthew Feinstein, the study’s lead investigator and a fourth-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“And that is true even after we adjusted for variables like age, race, gender, education, income, and baseline body mass index," he added.

Mockingbird should totally blog about this. I'll bet it is the potlucks. Or maybe it's that religious people don't smoke as much.

Well, that's good to know

Sue Blackmore, in a friendly article entitled, "Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind," has this to say about her recent discovery:

Are religions viruses of the mind? I would have replied with an unequivocal "yes" until a few days ago when some shocking data suggested I am wrong.

...

The idea is that religions, like viruses, are costly to those infected with them. They demand large amounts of money and time, impose health risks and make people believe things that are demonstrably false or contradictory. Like viruses, they contain instructions to "copy me", and they succeed by using threats, promises and nasty meme tricks that not only make people accept them but also want to pass them on.

This was all in my mind when Michael Blume got up to speak on "The reproductive advantage of religion". With graph after convincing graph he showed that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people.

...

So it seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as "viruses of the mind" may have had its day.

What strength and courage it takes to overcome one's previous assumptions.

Instead of "virus," it sounds like we can now conclude religion is more like a "bacterium of the mind."

Religions still provide a superb example of memeplexes at work, with different religions using their horrible threats, promises and tricks to out-compete other religions, and popular versions of religions outperforming the more subtle teachings of the mystical traditions. But unless we twist the concept of a "virus" to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply. Bacteria can be helpful as well as harmful; they can be symbiotic as well as parasitic, but somehow the phrase "bacterium of the mind" or "symbiont of the mind" doesn't have quite the same ring.

She has a point at the end, there. Although "Symbiont of the Mind" might make a great name for a math rock band.

One has to marvel at how this "shocking data" displayed in the form of a few graphs can shift a scientist's ardent beliefs about religion, while thousands of years of theological contemplation and discussion are irrelevant. But then again, this is coming from someone who admits she once had to let go of her earnest belief in the paranormal.

I guess what I have to get used to in this whole "dialog" is that there are plenty of smart people who aren't worth taking seriously.

Follow-up to previous post

Josh Schrei over at the Huffington Post has written a good article about the same study I blogged about last night. I thought his main point was very insightful:

Kanazawa's study, implemented anywhere else but the modern western world and in any other time period, would have drawn drastically different results. One simply cannot make the conclusions his team does without consideration of the cultural, environmental, and historical landscape.