Blog no.1

I enjoyed learning about meditation practice and finding out that people have their own ways to relax their mind and soul. I have many topic ideas and it is really hard to narrow it down to just one of them. Here are a few: how is the lack of public transportation in the US affecting the physical and psychological health of the American people? Do religious people have a better quality of life than atheists? Taking vitamin supplements – is it really good for you? and Overdoing it – hygiene and immunizations in children.

I will consider “Do religious people have a better quality of life than atheists”? as my example for this blog. I chose this because I am curious to find out more about the long term positive effects of pertaining to a certain faith and what are the differences between people who practice a religious belief system versus people who do not believe in a Higher Force and think that they have to rely on themselves only to be successful and healthy. I am more concerned with psychological health in this topic, but also with physical, such as healing by prayer.

I think there is a lot of opposition to the statement that religious people have a better quality of life and that might be coming from groups who practice and value science but are skeptical of trying something they cannot find evidence for, like the existence of God for example. Other people might just not believe in anything because they are atheists, but are healthy and successful, thus they would suggest that there is no need for faith, since they have everything they need without the help of a Higher Being. There is strong evidence about the long term positive effects on health of practicing a religion, especially when we look at old people and we are able to take into consideration their whole life and how faith contributed to their wellness. In the past, a lot of doctors disagreed with the power of faith in healing a diseased, but I am hoping that as I will start doing my research I would find out that there is some openness regarding this issue. However, in most cases, doctors think that if they arrived to the conclusion that a certain pathology cannot be cured, faith would not stand a chance in over passing science. But, there are cases where faith did cure when there was no hope for the patient.

This issue might be related to the power of mind and to the presumption that if we learn how to control our mind, it will lead us to being in charge of our anatomy and physiology processes, which is very interesting. An example of having such power over the body is a person who can control her/his blood pressure by using their mind. However, I believe there is a huge difference between wishful thinking and actually acting on what we want to achieve and I want to explore that in my paper.