Topic: Health and Religion - page 47. (Read 211023 times)

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Mental and physical health are the two major type of health.

Religion is a specific elements of a community of believers: dogmas, sacred books, rites, worship, sacrament, moral prescription, interdicts, organization. The majority of religions have developed starting from a revelation based on the exemplary history of a nation, of a prophet or a wise man who taught an ideal of life.

There are two issues here that are worth exploring.

1) Can costly ritual create purpose in and of itself?

Ritual requires sacrifice of material, time, or behavioral modification. Participating in ritual does several things. First it reinforces to the participant that he or she is serious about his belief structure. One paying only lip service to a concept would not undertake a hardship in its service especially if he did not fully understand the reason for the hardship.

Aesop's Fables were colllected and written 620 and 564 BC. One of the most famous is the story of the farmer and the viper. We know the story is at least 2500 years old and as an oral story it could be far older. The story concerns a farmer who finds a viper freezing in the snow. Taking pity on it, he picks it up and places it within his coat. The viper, revived by the warmth, bites his rescuer. The farmer dies reproaching himself "for pitying a scoundrel,".

One of the transformative elements of religion is the fostering of reciprocal altruism among strangers. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This principle if widely adhered to is fundamentally transformative. The world, however, is full of vipers and behaving altruistically with a viper is dangerous at best. It is not advisable for example to take a homeless person into your home to help him "get back in his feet" until you learn quite a bit more about him and the reasons for his homelessness.

So how do we determine who is a viper and who is not. If we are serious about the principle of mutual altruistic reciprocity we have to make this determination. One of the most powerful ways is to determine if the individual in question has committed themselves to a set of known core beliefs. It is very easy for a sociopath to lie. It is incredibly difficult for a sociopath to participate in costly rituals expressing allegiance to concepts they distain especially over prolonged periods of time.

Participation in voluntary ritual thus serves not only to reinforce internal commitment but also as external signaling informing others who you are. It's not a perfect source of information but actions always speak louder then words.

2) Is it possible that the Bible could be true but our understanding is simply lacking or our interpretation overly simplified?

This at least warrants consideration. Humans have a general tendency towards arrogance unwarranted extrapolation and overstating both our knowledge of the world and the reliability of that knowledge.

In recent years there has been a growing body of data indicating that eating pork might be actually unhealthy and we are better off with alternative sources of meat. I am unaware of similar data on shellfish or if it has been studied.

See:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17257930

For these reasons I don't think we can conclude that these rules and rituals are stupid. At most we can say that we do not understand their purpose and question their value.

My grandma is an adventist and she couldn't eat pig, rabbit most sea food and a few more. In all honesty, those are quite stupid rules, you either meat or you don't, those seemingly random chosen animals make no sense to me. That's why I can't take the bible seriously. Not even believers of the bible come to an agreement, you have christians, adventists, orthodox and many more.

Religion affects the way in which people present symptoms to the doctor and the types of treatment they will accept. Because some religions place restrictions on certain behaviours, religious beliefs may also influence a person's risk of illness in the first place

Vegetarianism and the morality of eating meat is a difficult one. There is not a single tribal society that is known to be vegetarian so it is reasonable to infer from this that eating meat provided a historical competitive advantage. Thus eating meat likely kept our ancient ancestors alive and without meat they would have perished. It is problematic to classify something as immoral when it was necessary to ensure our current existence.

There are also some poorly understood downsides to a vegan diet.

See:
Vegan diet increases the risk of birth defects
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/4902648/Vegan-diet-increases-the-risk-of-birth-defects-scientists-warn.html

Vegetarian diet linked to lower sperm count
http://www.adventistreview.org/church-news/vegetarian-diet-linked-to-lower-sperm-count

On the other hand there appear to be significant health benefits to giving up meat later in life. Several studies suggest that vegetarians live many years longer then their meat eating counterparts.

Given this juxtaposition my personal opinion is that the best course is to eat meat until one is finished having children and then work towards minimizing it as one becomes older. However, I claim no special insight on this issue.

Below is the Jewish view on eating meat. Judaism places stress on the proper treatment of animals. Unnecessary cruelty is forbidden.
http://www.jewfaq.org/m/animals.htm

The Seven-day Adventist a Christian denomination known for their health and longevity strongly favor vegetarianism but do not require it. The Seven-day Adventist who choose to eat meat are supposed to follow the health laws of Leviticus which makes their very diet similar to that of the Jews.

The sensation that everything feels meaningless is part of the crisis of nihilism. Once you no longer have up or down you are in a very bad place. Jordan Peterson describes this place as chaos in the short video clip below.


Jordan Peterson | What Nietzsche's "God is dead" means

God gives the ability for us to make medicine. But medicine that does not work according to nature is not health.

Health and religion

the man can by medicine, but God alone give you Health.

Morality is tricky. There was a time where I thought everything was pretty meaningless, a bit of a nihilistic view, and that nothing really was bad or good, everything was simply pointless. However I still couldn't force myself to do what I considered bad things even though I knew it didn't really matter. There is definitely some genetic factor at work, I get angry very quickly for example, I can control it but I still can't avoid getting angry in the first place. I'm personally struggling right now to decide whether eating animals is good or bad, I'm thinking it is morally wrong but I'm still debating it with myself.

But, for example, it is the things in our head that make us able to produce cars. Then people use cars, and become healthier because they don't get tired from walking all over the place, or they become unhealthier from using cars and not getting exercise.

The head... the same place that houses and defines our religion(s). Health and Religion.

I am not sure that religion and health can be associated like that. Any harm or maybe positive impact of religion on health is minimal at my opinion because everything in our head.

An interesting "side" point of this is, if people can get jobs other than agriculture and make more money, why can't they add the part-time job of personal family agriculture to their more-money, full-time job? This would mean better health for them, from growing their own vegetables. And it would be easier for them because they already have experience in agriculture.

Better health from religion in an additional way.

The Power of Religion
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/the-power-of-religion.html?

Scholarly studies have investigated the effects of religion on health. The World Health Organization (WHO) discerns four dimensions of health, namely physical, social, mental, and spiritual health. Having a religious belief may have both positive and negative impacts on health and morbidity.

Yet there is one area where natural selection, if true and real, is easily explained. What area is it? It's the area where dumb nature is way smarter than the combined scientists of the world.

The scientists of the world can't even create life in the lab, once, from scratch. Dumb nature has created thousands of different forms of life, that reproduce in such vast quantities as to be unfathomable in number, to say nothing about uncountable.

So, what have scientists proven... in reality? That they are too dumb to determine if there is any such thing as a beneficial mutation at all. And to top it all off, they continue to suggest that there is beneficial mutation, when they can't even begin to do what dumb nature is doing in super-fantastic ways. Did you catch that?... can't even begin...

You are welcome.
 
Here are some questions that I have found interesting to ponder.

We all like to say we are good people but are we really or do we just tell that to ourselves that so we don't have to think about our many flaws? Does the fact that we can point to others more evil and malevolent then ourselves really make us good?

Much of our inherited goodness comes from our parents and our society. We as individuals can claim only very partial credit for it. Perhaps what matters more is not what we were gifted but what we choose to do with the gift. Do we point ourselves at an ideal and struggle towards it? Do we strive towards reducing evil (especially in ourselves) or do we squander our gifts?

If we set ourselves toward the ideal how do we even define it or for that matter define good and evil? The alternative of course is the dark and nihilistic claim that there is no good and evil and that the ideal is untrue.

Don't feel obligated to actually respond to any of these questions unless you really want to. They are most useful as reflective exercises.

Health and Religion is a good thing to conduct a society for a good life

''There are several areas where natural selection seems to lack sufficient explanatory power. Most of these revolve around the problem of short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage at the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms. Each of these transitions requires overcoming the fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly; so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to become parasitic upon higher levels. In sum; natural selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative. ''



Assuming he is talking about mutations here I would add that most mutations are actually neutral.




''Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).

The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).

Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996). ''

But yeah, let's not get too far away from this topic, we could discuss more on the evolution thread.

Natural Selection holds that organisms adapt to their environments over time. This adaptation is thought to occur through a process of direct selection, fitness related reproduction, and occasional random search. Natural selection can coherently describe the historical situations leading to relatively small differences between organisms – perhaps up to the level of creating new and related species.

What so very few people realize is that Natural Selection is less a biological theory and more of a metaphysical frameworks for biology. Furthermore this framework is appears to be fundamentally incomplete.

There are several areas where natural selection seems to lack sufficient explanatory power. Most of these revolve around the problem of short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage at the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms. Each of these transitions requires overcoming the fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly; so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to become parasitic upon higher levels. In sum; natural selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative.

The general problem is therefore that the net effect of natural selection alone would be to break down the major transitions of evolution before they can be established – unless this tendency is overcome by some as-yet-unknown purposive (and indeed cognitive) long-termist, integrating and complexity-increasing tendency.

Neither natural selection, nor indeed artificial selection done by Man, has been observed creating a new genus, nor any taxonomic rank more fundamental such as a new family or phylum. There is no observational or experimental evidence which has emerged since 1859 of natural selection leading to major, qualitative changes in form – nor the originating of a novel form. Nobody has, by selection, changed a cat into a dog, let alone a sea anemone into a mouse (or the opposite); nobody has bred a dinosaur from a bird, nor retraced, by selective breeding, a modern species to its assumed ancestral form.

By all appearances natural selection appears to be a radically too small a metaphysical frame - it is not false but it leaves out too much.

Biology cannot exist without a metaphysical framework – and the current one may not be the best, since it has so many, such serious, failures to its name. This is the foundation for various challenges to the current dominant theory of human development. The critiques are serious and should not be casually dismissed.

For more info on this I recommend this excellent paper by Charlton. I borrowed from it liberally in this post.

Reconceptualizing the Metaphysical Basis of Biology
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/03/reconceptualizing-metaphysical-basis-of.html?m=1

Ugh, scientific theories change all the time. The theory of evolution is the best theory to explain natural evolution, there is no other better theory or even hypothesis. Maybe Coincube could explain this better to you since you seem to listen to him.

God is His Own entity. Eternal health starts with recognizing this.