Preston Grissom

Outside Reading #5

What Your Body Knows About God

            There has been a rise in the interest of “spiritual things” in the past 50 years in America.  While the scholars believed that the French Revolution and Enlightenment would lead to a decline in religion and eventually its demise, this has not occurred.  Actually, the opposite is beginning to happen.  People everywhere are starting to become more interested in what is outside the material world.  The question remains, why?  If so many things can be answered by modern science why would we still need to feel as if there is a God?  Rob Moll believes it is because our bodies are biologically programmed this way.

            In prayer, fasting, and meditation our brains are actually chaines as well as our bodies.  We are actually created to worship.  The “richer and more complex the experience, the more powerfully worshipers experience the meaning and the theology attached to it” (131).  We are also “hardwired for compassion” (177).   We are made to give and every study shows that giving to another increases joy. 

We are also made with an innate sense of morality.  “A lack of religious involvement has an effect on morality that is equivalent to 40 years of smoking one pack of cigarettes per day” (177).  Personally I am not sure how smoking cigs makes one less moral but the quote seems like a good bullet so moral religious folk. 

I believe that spiritual and emotional health are tied together.  So did Doctor and Pastor Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.  I believe that every single human is created with an innate sense of longing to have meaning and to be created in love.  Another created being can love us which will and does bring great joy, but until one realizes that they creator loves them will they really believe that their life has invaluable meaning.