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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] A new nationwide study of obituaries has found that people with religious affiliations lived nearly four years longer than those with no ties to religion.
That four-year boost -- found in an analysis of more than 1,000 obits from around the country -- was calculated after taking into account the sex and marital status of those who died, two factors that have strong effects on lifespan.
[...] "We found that volunteerism and involvement in social organizations only accounted for a little less than one year of the longevity boost that religious affiliation provided," Wallace said. "There's still a lot of the benefit of religious affiliation that this can't explain."
So what else explains how religion helps people live longer? It may be related to the rules and norms of many religions that restrict unhealthy practices such as alcohol and drug use and having sex with many partners, Way said.
In addition, "many religions promote stress-reducing practices that may improve health, such as gratitude, prayer or meditation," he said.
[...] Way said there are limitations to the study, including the fact that it could not control for important factors related to longevity such as race and health behaviors. But a potential strength was that, unlike other studies, religious affiliation was not self-reported, but was reported by the obituary writer.
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(Score: 1) by exaeta on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:10PM
I've always taken the position that "Infinity" is a condition-set of equations or bounds rather than a "number". If you adopt the principle that nothing can be equal to infinity and only a member of the "infinite set" you can do very useful tranformations on infinite series that yield correct results but produce "infinite" values as intermediates. Under "infinity is a number" logic, if sigma i=0; infinity; f(x) is equal to infinity, you cann't do any operations on it. So if I have two values X and Y and both are "infinity" then X - Y is undefined. But you can say instead that X and Y are members of the infinite set and subtract them, then get a finite value out. i.e., just because X and Y are members of infinity, it does not follow that X = Y.
The Government is a Bird