Awe

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Muslims practicing the salat: Van Cappellen, Patty, and Megan E. Edwards. “The Embodiment of Worship: Relations among Postural, Psychological, and Physiological Aspects of Religious Practice.” Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion 6, no. 1–2 (2021): 56–79.

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meditating or practicing yoga: For a treatment of the benefits of yoga, and its scientific study, see: Broad, William J.

The Science of Yoga. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

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sense of spiritual engagement: In one review of 145 studies involving 98,000 individuals, people who reported a sense of spirituality were less likely to be depressed. Smith, Timothy B., Michael E. McCullough, and Justin Poll. “Religiousness and Depression: Evidence for a Main Effect and the Moderating Influence of Stressful Life Events.” Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003): 614–36. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.4.614. Mystical awe is also good for our health. In an illustrative study, gay men with AIDS who regularly read spiritual texts, prayed, engaged in spiritual discussions, and attended services showed higher levels of killer T cells, part of the body’s immune response. Ironson, Gail, and Heidemarie Kremer. “Spiritual Transformation, Psychological Well-Being, Health, and Survival in People with HIV.” International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 32, no. 3 (2009): 263–81. Summing up these kinds of studies, one review found that religiously oriented people are less likely to die at any time in life. McCullough, Michael E., William T. Hoyt, David B. Larson, Harold G. Koenig, and Carl Thoresen. “Religious Involvement and Mortality: A Meta-analytic Review.” Health Psychology

19, no. 3 (2000): 211–22. https://doi.org/10.1037//0278-6133.19.3.211.

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And greater humility: Van Cappellen, Patty, Maria Toth-Gauthier, Vassilis Saroglou, and Barbara L. Fredrickson. “Religion and Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Positive Emotions.” Journal of Happiness Studies 17 (2016): 485–505. Van Cappellen, Patty, Maria Toth-Gauthier, Vassilis Saroglou, and Barbara L. Fredrickson. “Religiosity and Prosocial Behavior among Churchgoers: Exploring Underlying Mechanisms.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 26 (2016): 19–30.

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Groups that cultivated these tendencies: Norenzayan, Ara, Azim Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland, and Joseph Henrich. “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39 (2015): e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14001356.

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More intelligent design: Taves, Ann. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Norenzayan, Shariff, Gervais, Willard, McNamara, Slingerland, and Henrich. “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions.” Wilson, David S. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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The toxicities of communities: In his excellent book on morality, Joshua Greene suggests that such tribalism is the central moral problem facing our species today. Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.

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