This recent article seems to dispute your claims regarding health vs. religion.
Hey, didn't I already hedge my comment with respect to religion? My point is that the world's healthiest people tend to believe in some form of higher order, regardless of whether or not that comes as organized religion or as something else. By the way, your article makes no reference to any connection whether or not those countries with the most atheists are the most healthy.
Also, the statistics in the article seem to represent the numbers of people in each country who believe in
a God. I'd wager that amongst those who described themselves as atheist were people reacting to a hegemonic attitude, and that their response is in fact reflective of a counter-cultural reaction to years of indoctrination into monotheistic beliefs.
It wouldn't surprise me to discover that many of these atheists in reality have empowered themselves by discovering alternatives to "God." Maybe they've dug back into the culture of their region, and found that the polytheism of, for instance, the Norse gods is more representative of what they believe. Four out of the ten countries on your article's list are Scandinavian, so perhaps I've hit on something there?
And that's just an argument for people who use some kind of religion as their concept of higher order. The flood gates are open nowadays - there really are people out there who believe in "the Force" as it's described in the
Star Wars films. There are fans out there who idolize a rock band, or even a genre of music, and the rules or constructs of ideology for those bands or that fandom is enough to provide for them in the same sense as a higher order.
In short, as weird as extreme rock or sci-fi fans might seem, they're submitting themselves to what they consider higher orders than themselves, arguably to their apparent benefit. Those people aren't psychopaths, to the contrary, they're healthy because they submit to something higher than themselves, that is, they recognize the connection between themselves and others and empathize with the successes and failures of the people around them. The exclusive nature of much of Christianity, as portrayed in the movie
Saved, I'd argue is both in part the cause for and justification of these alternatives.