Faith, Medicine, and Purpose

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"Happiness is a moral obligation. There was nowhere in my childhood that happiness was a moral obligation. It was more about long suffering." - Dr. Daniel Amen

Dr. Daniel Amen grew up Catholic, an altar boy taught that faith meant long suffering, not happiness. He was scared of God more than he was connected to Him. Then a cute Army company clerk asked him to take her to church, which turned out to be a wild Pentecostal healing service with speaking in tongues and dancing. That unexpected detour led him to Teen Challenge, working with drug addicts who found staggering success rates when they stopped making recovery about themselves and started making it about their relationship with God. Years later, after becoming one of the world's leading brain scientists, he walked into his own church past tables of donuts being sold to fund ministry. He got angry. Really angry. So he prayed what felt like the stupidest prayer of his life: that God would use him to change the food culture at churches. Two weeks later, Rick Warren, pastor of one of the largest churches in the world, called him out of nowhere and said, "I'm fat. My church is fat. Will you help me?" Fifteen thousand people signed up the first week. They lost a quarter of a million pounds the first year.

The conversation reveals something most people don't know: there's hard science behind why faith works. Researchers at Duke have documented that people who attend religious services regularly get better faster when they're sick. They have lower rates of mental health issues. It's not just the community, though that helps. It's the belief itself. Believing you're here for a purpose, that your body is sacred, that you're wonderfully made. Those beliefs create actual neurotransmitter benefits in your brain. Dr. Amen's purpose is to make a dent in the universe by getting people to love and care for their brains, and he's discovered that faith and brain health aren't separate paths. Your health will reflect the health of your ten closest friends. You get better together or you get sick together. This is a conversation about finding purpose in what you thought was your dumbest moment, about how anger at church donuts can become a movement, and about why happiness isn't just a nice idea but a moral obligation.

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