Meanwhile, I think you've been disingenuous, playing with 'atheist' and general 'non-religious' interchangeably, as it suits your apologetic goal. And you are overplaying your hand as far as the benefits of congregational religion vs other socially engaging activities. It all smacks of propaganda to me.
I just used atheist as commonly used by atheists nowadays. This is the danger of the modern sophistic tendency to conflate atheism and agnosticism that is so prevalent. Ah, well. Call it propaganda if you wish, but that stinks of Bulverism to me.
It directly contradicted the assertion you made (and continue to make) about atheism.
It certainly doesn't. You just continue to neglect to read it, and insist on continueing to misrepresent it. Even the abstract doesn't, so that you can't read the full article is no defence: Its first line is "Extensive literature in the social and medical sciences link religiosity to positive health outcome" and concludes with "These findings highlight the necessity of distinguishing among different types of secular individuals in future research on health", not the blanket statement of atheists being healthier you take it as. It fully acknowledges the health benefit of religiousity.
What I am claiming is that it's the most significant beneficial aspect of congregational religious practice that is actually demonstrable. And it is by no means exclusive to religion.
Citation? No evidence of this except supposition, from what I've read. I think you are grossly overplaying your hand, my friend. The benefits of social interaction is largely extrapolated from religious activity too. Especially seeing that most such studies focus on the elderly or depressed, the former being disproportionately religious, and the latter participation itself has markedly less effect than combined relugious participation has.
For instance, this review:
Social participation as an indicator of successful aging: an overview of concepts and their associations with health
As they note, it is not really possible to do a valid systematic or quantitative review. So please indicate how, and in what way, this is 'demonstrable'? You are being a bit silly.
It is a fact, not an opinion, that every single phenomenon that has ever been studied has turned out to have a naturalistic explanation for its cause, when sufficiently supported by critically robust evidence.
Ha ha. That is patent nonsense. Everything we have studied by naturalistic means for which we found a cause, had a naturalistic explanation - but that is simply tautology and circular reasoning. A lot of phenomena we have no cause for, and could not find one naturalistically as of yet. For instance, Consciousness, Memory, Sense perception, Pain, etc. Sure, we have things like Neural Correlates of Consciousness, or we can point to our sense organs or nerves and say these are probably associated with it, but we certainly have not 'found' a naturalistic cause - even with mountains of robust critical evidence, from fMRI, EEG, nerve conduction studies, etc. Take Pain, an almost universal human experience, which we are forced to define as the subjective experience of the patient, as no good marker exists with sufficient sensitivity or specificity. We can broadly correlate it to sympathetic activation of the blood pressure or pulse, say, or point to neuromodulation with things like Substance P, but that hardly points to anything. I'd go so far as to say, the association is weaker than between religion and health.
If you start with the assumption that everything must have a naturalistic explanation, you can certainly ascribe explanations or a cause, but at heart, these are not definite. Even more so, with things like having to ascribe Consciousness to airy-fairy ideas like 'Emergent Properties' (meaning we can't show how, but surely it must lie in the nervous tissue in some manner?), this is more often than not an exercise in circular reasoning. We can't even fully show how a person breathes spontaneously, so you give far too much credence to the efficacy of a science of the gaps.
Please. Science is an exercise in induction, while Medicine prefers deduction. By neither methodology can any sort of cogent argument be made for your facile statement.
Whereas, at no time anywhere, ever, has a 'supernatural' or 'magical' explanation arisen to provide sufficient explanatory power for anything.
This is just an assumption based on the model you are applying, which gives a superior credence to empiric observation on no stronger grounds than the axiomatic. A product of our schooling, I suppose.
This is though a misunderstanding more than anything else. For instance, Gravity is not directly observed or measured, but inferred from accelaration, or weight, and associated with mass. We can't really say what it 'is', anymore than we can for something like energy. So a mysterious 'force' or interaction whose effects we note but cannot observe directly, is somehow naturalistic and deemed of sufficient explanatory power. There is a reason why great minds like Aristotle or Galileo struggled with this, using the same basic observations, prior to Newton. Quite a lot that passes as Scientific explanation is quite magical, I can assure you, though we forget it due to familiarity and the quotidian nature it has taken on. We uphold a bit of a double standard, in a lot of things.
It's not a mystery what that missing thing is. It's the one benefit that is actually very well documented, demonstrable, and nearly universally applicable - socially engaging activity.
No evidence to support this beyond opinion. Again, citation?
Is mere, generic 'belief' enough to appease this god (or gods) into rewarding people with *occasionally* detectable, exclusive benefits?
I think you mean consistently detectable benefits. Certainly that is something to look in to. However, as I stated, most of these studies are from WEIRD countries, so we are mostly dealing with Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism. Such things need to be repeated in other areas, though the lack of religious freedom in the Middle East or China, or India's growing Hindu nationalism, complicates such and acts as confounding factors. At the moment though, I have no reason to think any kind of theological problem is evident, and even then, I believe in one God, who is the source of all good. It isn't an either/or situation, in that all human religious activity is obviously therefore directed at the same source, no matter how misguided it may be, and if we are looking at a teleological factor intrinsic to the human organism here, I would expect other religions to also show some health benefit.
Atheism isn't a lifestyle, so no. It's not comparable. It's a category error.
Atheism is a lifestyle if your excuse for its demonstrated poorer health outcomes is lack of social engagement, and seek to rectify it by created atheistic social networks. In essence, you create a 'community' to measure against the theistic one. You are simply engaged in hairsplitting, if not sophistry.