Do you attend church weekly? Yearly?

[timmah]

plzdontbanme said:

timmah said:

kamil said:

@timmah:

I beg to differ! There are many scientific studies that show Churchgoers live an average of 1.8-8 years (or so, depending on the study) longer than non-churchgoers. If a weekly churchgoer spends roughly 1.5 years in church, they have a net gain of life OUTSIDE of church over the non-churchgoer.

So God gives that time back to us . And if you go to a church you enjoy, like I do, you don't consider it time lost, but time well spent. My time in church not only will probably give me longer life than otherwise, but it will help me to live that life better and more fulfilled!

Weekly for me!

A few quick sources:

http://www.livescience.com/health/060403_church_good.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/05/990517064323.htm

http://www.webmd.com/news/20000809/religious-people-live-longer-than-nonbelievers

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LivingLonger/story?id=1242497

If you look at his list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
you really won't see religious countries at top of the list. In fact US which is considered the most religious rich country is at 29th position below most European
secular countries, Japan, Australia and New Zealand (lower is Denmark and - also quite religious - Ireland). I know that this only shows correlation but so does your reports (and did not prove any mechanism beyond this).

Where did comparing countries come into this? That makes no sense whatsoever and does absolutely nothing to disprove my point, nothing. To do a SCIENTIFIC comparison of the corrolation between life expectancy and religious activity, you would have to eliminate as many other external factors as possible- diet, physical activity level, obesity, genetics, etc. By comparing different countries, you have introduced a myriad of different factors that can effect life expectancy. For example, do you think national obesity MAY have some effect?? How about the war zones? They seem to have a low life expectancy. You have to compare apples to apples so to speak. This moves your point far out of the realm of reason as relating specifically to religion. You're really reaching on that one.

The studies I cited compared people that were similar in geography, age, culture, eating habits, etc. Find a study of that nature that disproves the point and try again 

 Everyone knows that religion and science don't mix.

Everyone knows that your general and unsubstantiated statement must be true. That was a brilliant one sentance argument. Wow, the sources, the science, the absolute brilliance behind your statement is overwhelming :-p.

Edit: your one sentance argument fails because most of these studies were done by non-religious scientific people to simply study a corrolation between activity in religious services and life expectancy. This was not a group of 'religious people' trying to make themselves feel better about going to church, and it's not just one biased study either, it's many studies over a period of time that tend to have the same result.