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Whatever the reason, a major new study concludes that "young adults who frequently attend religious activities are 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age as young adults with no religious involvement." The research carried out by Northwestern University's medical school tracked 2,433 men and women for 18 years and adjusted for differences in age, race, sex, education, income and baseline body mass index -- which makes this the first longitudinal study to examine the relationship between obesity and religious involvement.

Let's be clear. The study does not suggest that religious belief leads to obesity. Instead, it raises questions about the kinds of physical activities young people in churches typically engage in and recommends that church leaders carefully reflect on how to encourage young people to establish healthier patterns of behaviour. Matthew Feinstein, the study's lead investigator, says: "It's possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity."

It may be that this study applies particularly to American churches; no similar study has been carried out in Britain and Ireland. In which case, one needs to factor in the backdrop of a massive obesity crisis within American society generally and ask to what extent America's churches have played a role in generating that crisis.

Read the official press release from

These are some of the week's big religion and ethics news stories. You can talk about the stories on this thread and suggest others.

Religion stories
Christian and ?
European Court of Human Rights rules crucifixes
Irish Catholic newspaper gives
Does faith make you ?
Rob Bell fights back against
Why feminists are less ?
US Jesuits agree £103 million abuse .
Why Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage
Tiny church finds original
Jordan battles to regain 'priceless' Christian relics.
Thousands leave Finnish Lutheran church over
Blackburn schools to teach
Divine dispatches: a religion .
Jay Bakker: Fall to Grace: Can Churches Find Enough

Ethics in the news
AV: For and .
Review: Civilization: The West and the Rest
Memory on Trial: how sound is our knowledge of past abuse experiences?
Can writing stop prisoners reoffending?

Thinking allowed
A psychologist makes
New interview: Richard Dawkins on
Our evolutionary future:
Geoff Dyer on

Researchers in the United States have been trying to model the decline of religion in various regions of the world, including Ireland. We'll hear more about their findings on this week's Sunday Sequence. But I asked lead researcher Dr Richard Wiener, from the
Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Department of Physics at the University of Arizona, to summarise their work for Will & Testament. You can read a more detailed technical summary . Richard Wiener writes:

Much like animals competing for a limited supply of food or water, social groups can be thought of as self-perpetuating entities that compete for members. Research on social conformity suggests two key factors might give one group an advantage over another in this battle for resources:

• A social group with more members of a society is typically more attractive to potential new members.
• A social group with a higher perceived social status or utility is more likely to draw in new members.

We can express these two statements as mathematical rules and use them as the basis for a nonlinear dynamical model of how people change membership between social groups. In the simplest case in which only two social groups compete, these rules (plus a few fairly innocuous assumptions) imply that there can only be three possible long-term steady-state outcomes: group X dominates, group Y dominates, or both groups stably coexist at constant percentages of society.

We apply this model to the competition between the religious and irreligious segments of modern secular societies. The two competing social groups are people claiming no religious affiliation and people claiming membership in a religion. Treating all the religions in a society as one large social group is plausible for countries where religion is nearly homogeneous.

We compare the model to historical census data on religious affiliation taken from 85 data sets from regions of nine modern secular democracies: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. The census data show that religious non-affiliation is growing rapidly in these countries. We find the model fits the data well, and the particular fit also implies that the coexistence of the religious and irreligious segments is unstable. The slight advantage in perceived utility of religious non-affiliation in these societies might lead to the eventual disappearance of religion over the long term.

We generalize the model to include effects of social networks: rather than an individual finding it more attractive to belong to the global majority of society, he or she instead wishes to belong to the local majority among his or her social contacts. We use network analysis to show that, although there is a time delay, just a few out-group social connections are enough to drive defection from the religious group, leading to its long-term decline, so long as the perceived utility of non-affiliation is greater than that of affiliation.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide say it has been informed that "five Iranian Christians, who were recently sentenced to one year's imprisonment for crimes against the Islamic Order at the Revolutionary Court in Shiraz, will stand trial in a lower court on blasphemy charges in fifteen days time. Pastor Behrouz Sadegh-Khandjani, Mehdi Furutan, Mohammad Beliad, Parviz Khalaj and Nazly Beliad, members of the Church of Iran denomination, were arrested in June 2010 on charges of apostasy, political meetings, blasphemy and crimes against the Islamic Order. They spent eight months in jail before being released on bail in February. Their lawyer has appealed the one-year prison sentence for crimes against the Islamic Order and a decision is pending."

The CSW statement continues: "The situation for Christians in Iran is worsening, with churches finding it difficult to hold meetings, and many Christians attempting to flee the country. Christians in Iran are also increasingly concerned for Yousef Nadarkhani, the pastor of a large congregation in the city of Rasht, who was arrested in late 2009. He remains in prison after having been sentenced to death for the crime of apostasy, despite there being no articles in the Iranian legal code that refer to such a crime. Instead, the presiding judge in the Nadarkhani case based his ruling on texts by Iranian religious scholars. An appeal to the Supreme Court was filed in December, and a hearing is due within two months."

The Shema -- "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4) -- was the centrepiece of all Jewish prayer services, and monotheism is, fundamentally, what separated Hebrew believers from their neighbours. But was monotheism the only tradition within Judaism? Was polytheism (or ) ever the mainstream conception of God? And did the ancient Hebrew believers also believe God had a wife? After all, the idea of a married deity is philosophically no stranger than the idea of an unmarried or eternally single deity -- right?

Dr Stavrakopoulou says the text of the Old Testament contains evidence of a divine spouse who has been revised and edited out of the mainstream biblical theological tradition.

Watch the programme here and tell me what you think.

These are some of the week's big religion and ethics news stories. You can talk about the stories on this thread and suggest others.

Religion stories
Bible's Buried Secrets:
Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.
Two-thirds of Britons not religious, suggests survey.
UK cleric leaves
Franklin Graham: Japan disaster
Irish Catholic bishops
Free schools will not teach creationism,
Priest falls foul of congregation
Christian group: 'Our iPhone
Judge overturns ban on
A durable doomsday preacher
Elizabeth Taylor:
Church of Ireland suspends

Ethics in the news
Libya and
The Midsomer
An end to 50:50 police .
This mop-topped stargazer revels in the insignificance of mankind.

Thinking allowed
How to write an .
Of Human .

Martin Bashir's interview with Rob Bell (watch ) may or may not clarify what its actually being said in the most talked-about evangelical book of the moment. Bell has been accused of heresy by leading evangelicals in the United States ahead of the publication of his book . The book has now been published, but the debate continues: Is Bell arguing that Hell will be empty? Does he believe that God will ultimately (even posthumanous) "persuade" every human being -- including Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein -- to join the godly fold?

In the book, Bell avoids a clear and straight-forward answer to those questions, mostly because he believes there is no basis for such clarity in the biblical texts and the Christian tradition. Instead he says: "Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don't need to resolve them or answer them because we can't, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires."

Bashir seems ready for a fight, and Bell seems bemused by the rhetorical battering. But Bell's approach to questions is to answer, "Absolutely not, but ...", which will inevitably leave some of his audience wondering if he is ultimately a universalist or not.

Going further

Watch another interview on during which Bell responds to claims that he is a 'false prophet'.

Read Mark Vernon's

These are some of the week's big religion and ethics news stories. You can talk about the stories on this thread and suggest others.

Religion stories
Faith, evidence and
Life after the earthquake: Archbishop of the
Cardinal brands UK aid foreign policy 'anti-Christian'.
Britain's most traditional church
Congressional Hearing on Radicalization
Pastor Rob Bell Catches
Advertising company steps forward to allow "censored"

Ethics in the news
New book explore the
Opinion: 'Gay-friendly Christianity has become a
Covering disaster:
Panorama: Tabloid Hacks Exposed.

Thinking allowed
David Hume and .
Beyond Belief: On Immortality.
Migration and

That said, there's nothing like a bit of controversy if Bell is now a card-carrying "universalist" (i.e., those who reject the idea that anyone will face eternal punishment in favour of the view that every human being will be ultimately saved).

The theological battle lines American evangelical preachers, writers and bloggers are now furiously arguing about whether it is time to say, "to hell with hell".

He served as the university's pastor for nearly four decades, , and in that time became a prominent cultural voice in the United States and internationally. Those who listened to him preach say he also became the conscience of Harvard University.

In 1991, following the publication of an anti-gay article in a Harvard University student magazine, Gomes felt the need to speak publicly about his own homosexuality in order to challenge what he saw as the institutionalisation of homophobia. Five years later he published a bestselling book, which made a theological case for a revolution in how we approach sacred texts within the modern world.

I met Peter Gomes in New York soon after the publication of The Good Book. It was a brief encounter: he was speaking at the church on Fifth Avenue where I was working at the time and we took part in the same event. I was, like everyone else who met him, taken by his elegance, his graciousness -- an almost aristocratic exterior which masked a natural earthiness -- and by his considerable skills as a orator. I heard him preach a handful of times, and I am not at all surprised that he was regularly named in lists of America's all-time greatest preachers.

Gomes was not a natural culture warrior, though he found himself on a few battlefields from time to time. But he had had the enviable capactity to win over opponents with sparkling displays of humour and humanity and understood that winning people is more important than winning arguments. With his death, American Christianity is a little less colourful and the global debate about the place of spirituality in public life has lost one of its surest voices.

Watch Charlie Rose
Peter Gomes preaches at
Peter Gomes
Tea Time with Rev.