Loneliness by John T Cacioppo

You are invited to a gathering of the Friends of St Thomas this evening, July 16, at 7:00 p.m. at North Hill Adventist Fellowship, 10106 36th Street E, Edgewood, WA 98371,

The springboard for our conversation will be some ideas I read in a book, Loneliness by John T Cacioppo and William Patrick.

"After sorting through mountains of data, the three authors found no association between depth of spiritual feeling and health. Instead what they found was a strong, prospective, and often graded reduction of mortality linked to individuals who actually attend religious services. In other words, people who regularly went to church or synagogue lived longer than those in similar situations who did not. In some studies there is even a "dose effect," meaning that those who go to church more than once a week enjoy even better health than those who attend only once a week. Overall, the reduction in mortality attributable to churchgoing is twenty-five percent--a huge amount in epidemiological studies--even after discounting other effects, such as the fact that, yes, being religious generally leads to a more healthful lifestyle." p. 261

In a paragraph that was made more curious by the authors' strong attachment to materialism, including the purposeless movement of history, they wrote:

"As social beings with a DNA-based interest in teh future, we are driven to look beyond ourselves not just for connection but for meaning. The "selfish gene" led to the social brain. . . . Eventually, in a continuing progression, the same shaping forces of natural selection gave rise to the Third Adaptation [the authors' term for the distinctive reality of homo sapiens in contrast to the culture of chimpanzees and bonobos]. . . . This drive for meaning appears to have endowed us with a biological need to be linked with somethng greater than ourselves. It is only through some ultimate sense of connection that we can face our own mortality without despair . . . Just as finding social connection is good for us, finding that transcendant something appears to be very good for us, whether it is a belief in a deity or a belief in the community of science." pp. 262-263.