Religion And Health

How do Religions affect our personal lives? How do religions affect our personal lives then? I am going to focus on the impacts of religiousness and spirituality on health and college life. According to “How does prayer help manage emotions” by Sharp, Social scientists can’t prove or deny God’s existence, but they are interested in studying the important role that religion and spirituality play in our everyday lives (Sharp 2010). He argues that religiousness or spirituality activity such as praying encourages social interactions and he also points out that having a relationship with God can be considered having a self-interaction. According to his research, He found 62 participants who had experience of abuse and with backgrounds of age,

There is also another study that reflects there might be positive relationship between religiousness and health. The other study revealed this association only for women, such that women with lowest religiousness through adulthood lives less than women who were more religious, but this association was found to be attributable to variables like personality traits, social ties, health behaviors and mental and physical health (McCullough, Enders & Martin, 2009). However, there are different approaches to the relationship between health and religion According to the article "Is religion bad for your health" by Clay Routledge, the author argues that religion could give you stress because when your religious beliefs get challenged. For example, if a person strongly desires to believe the traditional Biblical view that God created humans in their present form but is confronted with an increasing amount of evidence that another perspective (evolution) is more accurate, this individual may be distressed (Routledge 2009). The author also suggest that strong religious belief

Karl Marx perceived religion with conflict theory arguing that religion is an opium making people to be blinded to the truth and help powerful people to control over them. On the other hand, Émile Durkheim considered religions are just not limited to the spiritual and religious concept but those are important factors that constitute the society. When it comes to how religions and spirituality have impacts on our individual lives were also different. Some researchers found that religious and spirituality activity has positive impacts on individual health and there are also article that religions might cause negative effects on health. Also, there was a research that there are a positive relationship between GPA and religiousness affiliation. However, there was also a study in contrast to this result saying that there might be no relationship between two variables. In other words, we cannot just generalize the fact that having a relationship with God and making an interaction with an imaginary friend makes you healthy and improves your GPA because the researches above have limitations that there might be not that strong relationship between religions and other variables and we also do not know the causality. I believe that is why the results are different. So, we cannot