If you’re in a religious congregation and ask God for longer life, you are likely to get it. It doesn’t even seem to matter which god you ask. Any sort of religious activity increases your longevity, according to the psychologist Michael McCullough (who isn’t religiously devout himself). He looked at more than three dozen studies that had asked people about their religious devotion and then kept track of them over time. It turned out that the nonreligious people died off sooner, and that at any given point, a religiously active person was 25 percent more likely than a nonreligious person to
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