Skepticum

Dinesh D’Souza wrote today that a “great benefit of Christianity is that it helps us to cope well with suffering and death. ”

Time magazine reported on the case of a woman who suffered a series of tragedies. Her husband was laid off. She had a miscarriage. A month later her first cousin was diagnosed with cancer. Then two hurricanes struck her home town in Florida. Finally, one of her best friends died from a brain tumor. Here is the woman’s reaction: “We’re putting our lives in God’s hands and trusting He has our best interests at heart. I’ve clung to my faith more than ever this year. As a consequence, I haven’t lost my joy.”

Joy under these conditions simply isn’t natural, and that is this woman’s point — only the supernatural can produce enduring joy in the face of life’s tragedies. When we are in pain and feeling hopeless, Christianity raises our spirits. We don’t know why we are in this situation, but we have faith that there is a reason, even if only God knows what it is. Perhaps God is trying to teach us something, or to draw us closer to Him. Christianity also gives us the hope that when someone dies, we will see that person again.

It is heart-breaking to hear one has gone through so much in a short period of time. As D’Souza didn’t link to the Time article he paraphrased I could not verify the story but I will choose to assume it is a true story.

D’Souza uses this story to support the idea that Christianity is great because it helps us [humans?] cope with suffering and death. I will argue below that Christian manifestations of faith are just an expression of human coping mechanisms, and do not prove Christianity as the end all of human need.

So let’s assume the worst happened within a year, and the woman says she hasn’t lost her joy. In this report we don’t have any behavioral indication that she is happy, however D’Souza takes her statement as fact. And because he sees this as fact he adds that “when we are in pain and feeling hopeless, Christianity raises our spirit.”It is myopic though to claim this story as proof for how Christianity may raise one’s spirit. However, a recent study on depression and anxiety showed that people who attended church with a certain frequency and prayed a few times a week suffered less than others from depression and anxiety. BUT:

This benefit disappeared with the most religious patients, the ones who prayed at least once a day and attended church with the most frequency. They actually suffered the highest levels of depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic symptoms, along with kinesiophobia, the fear of movement and reinjury. “In essence, prayer appears to be a very effective pain-coping skill until it is used exclusively and to the exclusion of other active coping strategies,” Edwards says. “There is a time for prayer and there is a time for action.” Duke Magazine, Oct-Nov. 2006

The researchers involved in the study mentioned above also found that meditation and yoga had similar effects as prayer, so it’s not the religion that helps with depression but activities that relieve psychological stressors.

Our body exibits a number of other coping mechanisms in the face of pain and trauma. In cases of stress-related pain or trauma, the body responds with stress-induced analgesia. For example, our brains produce endocannabinoids, a chemical similar to cannabis that doesn’t only have analgesic properties but also helps us forget.

Other studies have shown that in situations of trauma our body also kicks in endorphis, which results in a reduced amount of information the brain stores (also known as memory loss).

“If you’re hit by a car,” Edwards asks, “how productive is it to remember the first sound of crushing or the feeling of a rear wheel breaking an arm and a leg?” Likewise, he says, there’s an evolutionary advantage for women to forget the agony of childbirth: It makes them more willing to endure another pregnancy and pass on their genes. Duke Magazine, Oct-Nov. 2006

D’Souza’s claims on Christianity’s usefulness at diffusing suffering are unsupported and faulty. Christian prayer is just a coping mechanism, one of numerous possible coping mechanisms, and certainly one that may not simply work on its own. Any other religion’s prayers may work just as well, or just as little. Medical intervention may help even more. So by D’Souza’s logic should we call medicine god?

There is one last question I’d like to raise, why did the woman choose the word “joy” to express her emotions? Does not feeling joy imply lack of faith? At the end of reading D’Souza’s post it was this question that preoccupied me most. The response to the tragedy was not, “we are saddened but we’re putting our lives in god’s hands.” I could see that as a potential expression of faith. But no, the answer was “I haven’t lost my joy.” Who was she trying to convince?

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