Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Next, if it is an intervening deity with discernible rules, the deity provides the comfort of both attribution and predictive information—carry out ritual X, or Y is going to happen. And thus, when things go wrong, there is an explanation.* If it happens that things have really gone wrong just to you, there is the opportunity to reframe the event, in the extraordinary way achieved by some of the parents of children with cancer—God has entrusted you with a burden that he can’t entrust to just anyone. If it is a deity who does all the above, and will respond to your personal and specific entreaties (especially if the deity preferentially responds to people who look/talk/eat/dress/pray like you), there is an added layer of control introduced. And if on top of all that, the deity is viewed as benign, the stress-reducing advantages must be extraordinary. If you can view cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, if you can view the inevitable cessation of the beating of the hearts of all your loved ones, all in the context of a loving plan, that must constitute the greatest source of support imaginable.