20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction
psypost.org
psypost.org
The article says the study suggests there's not a really strong causal relationship in either way which surprises me a little but yeah I can see it given the experience.
And If I were to find religion suddenly again now I imagine it may only increase life satisfaction based on the fact I have no real community at the moment and that I think is probably a more interesting study.
How much has external community (i.e. not close friends, partners and families) breakdown occurred over the last 40 years and what is the effect on our life satisfaction? My grandfather was a part of a bunch of men's clubs etc last I checked most of those are floundering now.
I guess one of the downsides of forming my own belief system versus religion is it's bedrock is just a wee bit younger and potentially less well formed as I've been learning. Back to the drawing board :P
More on the topic, most Christians I know seem (and admit to being) profoundly unhappy. Perhaps they weren't dosing their sacraments correctly.
Grace is, even though I deserved God's justice and wrath, Jesus Christ died in my place, taking the judgment I deserved, and offering me forgiveness instead, which I totally did not deserve. That's grace.
...which talks about community trust and whether different groups believe that others in their neighborhood would be willing to help out, and resonates with my neighborhood experiences while living in various different places, including among those of other/no faiths.
Edit: My personal experience and observation has also been that those active and devoted in my faith have much greater success in solving the inevitable problems of life, and having united multigenerational families, than those who choose other paths (but we still love them). And that increased devotion correlates with increased education, and with success in having a stable life with ability to help others. (So many examples...)
E.g. maybe happy people are more likely to be religious, but like with most social science, there is no way to test this with the scientific method because of ethical reasons.
My favorite stat is that weekly church goers report the highest satisfaction in their sex lives.
That's really interesting. Is there more data? Any differences between the sexes? Age?
Going by kid-count I'd wager we're talking Catholics and Mormons.
While I can't find the source now, my favorite stat is that paid-per-view porn spikes during Christian men's conferences.
EDIT: ^at hotels
Or their families watching back at home?
So I always find it strange when 'religiosity' is used as a catch-all personality trait and everyone who identifies as religious is lumped together.
I haven't been able to look at the specific six-question set used in the study to measure religiosity, but something tells me that with only six questions, we can ascertain the impact of a person's particular religious beliefs and practices on their life in only the vaguest way.
This sounds like a game! 20 questions, but with religion!
BTW, I'm writing this as a complete atheist. Spending most of my youth in catholic schools helped me to know many people of all those groups, and believe me, for us atheists recognizing someone that is just pretending to be religious is truly easy.
I think you meant to say illegal immigrants, undocumented workers, or some other word.
> Of course the 2nd and especially the 3rd group have absolutely nothing to do with anything christian, and they profess them as such only to not feel guilty, or possibly because the society they live in requires that (how many votes would a politician get is he/she admitted being atheist?) - religion for them is just a series of acts (go to church, make offers, say prayers aloud, etc.) intended to cheat the system and appear as good people while in realty they aren't. I am also sure that the 1st group live a better life, which doesn't mean they'll earn more, actually it's quite likely the opposite, but they grow better "antibodies" to overcome difficulties without anger.
I think you doing a covert type of name-calling here.
Are Christians not supposed to care about US laws?
I care about the law. If we willfully ignore the laws, where could that stop? What would be the impetus to fix the laws that need updating, or the problem areas we have like a gap in short term agricultural visas?
If we encourage illegal border crossing, who will that benefit, and hurt?
I think it will benefit cartels, coyotes moving people, as well as the big corporations that operate meat-packing plants and foodservice, exploiting low cost labor, and underpaying people. It may benefit the person coming to the US, until that eventual time when they are caught, and sent home.
I think it will also hurt all the people looking for good paying jobs in lower ends of the service sector, and all the legal immigrants that are waiting in line for a chance. All the people that are hurt by an uncontrolled criminal element preying on members of their own communities. Nope, can't think about them. All the construction workers that used to be able to raise a family on doing residential work, nope, can't be concerned about them. Via exploiting the local emergency room for free medical care via EMTALA, the local hospital system will be damaged too, forcing higher rates to be negotiated with insurers, adding to ever increasing insurance rates. Nope, can't talk about that either.
please, refrain from projecting a simplistic morality onto others. There are many points of view out there.
I was mainly referring to African immigrants in southern/eastern Europe. Their situation is completely different from Mexican immigrants in the US, yet there are far right politicians who will happily let them die while attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea to build consent among their far right supporters. Seriously, there's no such thing as illegal immigration when the alternative for those people is being jailed or shot in their own country.
This natural experiment looks more interesting, although it exploits just a temporary shock (variation in the length of Ramdan):
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/130/2/615/2330341?login...
"We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of daily fasting due to the interaction between the rotating Islamic calendar and a country’s latitude. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: (i) longer Ramadan fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and (ii) it increases subjective well-being among Muslims. We find evidence that these patterns are consistent with a standard club good explanation for the emergence of costly religious practices: increased strictness of fasting screens out the less committed members, while the more committed respond with an increase in their relative levels of participation."
For example Latin Mass attending Catholics who honestly try to live the Church's teachings fully may report a different happiness level than casual Catholics who show up to Church occasionally and don't really live the life that the Church teaches them to.
It's fair to differentiate between authentically lived religion and more hollow performative religion.
Citation please
"To focus attention on one equilibrium with no higher appeal, it would be best to consult the highest possible authority. If the players share a cultural understanding that certain unpredictable processes may be used by the fundamental divine spirit of the universe to answer questions, and that this divinity cannot be bothered about the same question more than once, then a recommendation that is based on such a sacred randomization can serve as a focal coordination device that cannot be appealed to any higher arbitrator. Then the oracle's recommendations can be self-enforcing, without any further intervention by the divine spirit, provided that the recommendations to the players form an equilibrium. Thus the focal-point effect can admit a socially significant role for oracles and divination, as an effective foundation for social coordination. Indeed, when we look for effective focal factors, what can command people's attention more than the overall pattern of the whole universe? This divine pattern can serve as a focal determinant, however, only when players have a shared understanding about it can be interpreted into a selection among the set of Nash equilibria of their game.
...
"In any society, it is vital to maintain a broad general agreement about who has legitimate authority in any situation. Thus, from our earlier remarks about the focal power of the divine, we can see why societies may find it useful or even essential to call for frequent testimony that the local system of rules and authority is compatible with the divine pattern of the universe. Although coordination within a society can be improved by such belief in the universal nature of its principles of justice and legitimate authority, such universalization of local law and authority makes it harder for people in one society to recognize the different forms of justice and authority in other societies (see Myerson, 2006). That is, the same forces that help people to achieve consistent coordinated expectations in a successful society can become forces for inconsistency of expectations across societies in international relations. Indeed, in international conflicts throughout history, people on each side have regularly failed to understand the other side's perception of justice in their conflict.
...
"The focal-point effect may even offer a perspective on some ideas of theology, not about the nature of the divine, but about how societies use the divine. The focal-point effect is about environmental parameters that attract people's attention to one of many equilibria, and no aspect of our environment has a stronger claim on our attention than the divine pattern of the entire universe. Thus, coordination in a society can be strengthened when it culturally portrays local forms of law and authority as derived from universal divine principles."
They don't have a point.
They just exist.
My own notes/additions to the above include:
1) Live the gospel meaning to keep commandments (like the 10), do what one knows is right, be humble and faithful, etc in order to have the promised ~ "...peace in this life, and eternal life in the world to come." I have seen the results in stable multigenerational family organizations, and ability to work through very hard times. And to know life and hard things have a good purpose and is worth it. And so much more.
2-4) so very much could be said. example-- https://www.thechurchnews.com/living-faith/2021-10-25/nation... ... which resonates with my neighborhood experiences, including with those not of our faith.
And the extensive humanitarian work (where 100% of those specific donations go to those in need, none to admin overhead) and high voluntarism.
People didn't adopt that principle because religion told them to, they adopted it because it allowed them to outcompete the primitive societies that didn't.
I'm not so sure anymore.
The point of religion is to solve civilisation wide coordination dilemmas like war. How do you get people to kill and die for strangers?
Religion's purpose is to get people to do horrible things not to behave nicely. It's used for wars mostly (plus genocides etc).
That's why we no longer need it. If we were fighting a ground war against a dangerous invading force it would be socially useful. But we're not.
This is also why religion has only flourished in places with exactly those issues (Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine recently).
Unless the plan for solving climate change is to convince x% of people to kill themselves, religion won't help with that any more than it helps with poverty or crime.
we all have existential crysis, deep fear, doubts, dilemmas. These questions are also in religion, now religion was probably a huge pile of everything from existence, to social life, morality, sexuality and family and yeah converting / conquering other people or other faiths.
You don't go to church to gather weapons but to marry, celebrate birth and grieve death.
> Unless the plan for solving climate change is to convince x% of people to kill themselves, religion won't help with that any more than it helps with poverty or crime.
Climate religion basically is telling people they need to go without the comforts of modern society (and generally live in some sort of centrally controlled societal construct that minimizes individual rights) in the name of some eternal paradise. It's not quite as severe as sending people to their deaths, but it's the same idea of convincing people to act against their own interests (and to let the priests continue to do what they want in the name of spreading the word) in order to fulfill some divine purpose.
(I should add as a sibling post did, I believe there are many positive points to religion as well, I'm responding to your post that essentially addresses religion as a coercion (sp?) mechanism
Your view that religion is only really used to motivate war is incredibly shallow and I encourage you to broaden your horizons on this subject.
Flat out false.
> Philip and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, which chronicles some 1,763 wars that have been waged over the course of human history. Of those wars, the authors categorize 123 as being religious in nature, which is an astonishingly low 6.98% of all wars.
Christian here. Our titular hero - the very God of our universe - was beaten and hung on a cross to die (slowly). It is hard to look at that and think "following this guy is going to increase my life satisfaction".
"Happy people, singing people, party people, happy people Jamming on the party session, oh Lord Sing Hallelujah..." etc
I mean, imagine putting someone into a world where every wish they had was immediately granted. Would they be happy? Probably for awhile, but I don't think they would be happy for long. Imagine a dire or generally unpleasant situation, and imagine who could get through that and still be happy. Or maybe happy is the wrong word, but at least to not give up and to be kind to others. That sort of thing, being able to make the most out of any situation, is difficult and usually takes a lot of practice.
(Which isn't to say we should tolerate suffering because it's a good "learning experience" for someone. Maybe it is, but to be okay with someone else's suffering is also a learning experience that, in my opinion, reinforces the wrong sorts of behavior.)
If I had a bad day and it so happened that it was the day where I was supposed to fill in a form on my life satisfaction, my answer would probably be very biased regardless if I was religious or not.
It also fails to take into account that not all religions are based on happiness meaning that life satisfaction in this world is not the be all and all.
An example is Islam. In Islam this worldly life is considered as a test. So you're going to be tested with hardship, afflictions and so on. There is also the concept of this being cyclical. After hardship comes ease. (not really cyclical in the sense that hardship comes because you had some ease before it but more like tuples of (hardship, ease) coming your way one after the other)
If you keep steady while you're being tested you'll be rewarded with paradise or/and a period of ease in this life.
Otherwise if you disobey Allah's commandements and die upon disbelief (You did not repent sincerely while you were still alive.) you'll likely go to hell.
Here it would be understandable to the believer that their life will not be all roses.
Studied population: 4167 American adults.
Conclusion: All religions are bad.
Which is why the study does not draw a conclusion on the viability of all religion, it merely says that it doesn't see much evidence that religiosity leads to life satisfaction. The author even notes "these results need to be evaluated within the context of the study." Hardly the wholesale dismissal of religion you claim it's making.
In fact, when we look at religious morality through history with the eyes of modernity, we see what we can only describe as a vast chasm of immorality. Sure, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and once in a while, religious morals get it right.
It’s often said by atheists like myself, if you want to become an atheist, simply read the religious books of any major religion. The problem is that most religious adherents have no idea what their books actually say, and take most of their beliefs on faith from authority. But when you really read the books, you realize that this is not a paragon of morality by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm not an antiquity specialist, but from what i've heard the first monotheism was probably zoroastrism (might have been a duotheist religion as first, with their Satan equivalent being as powerfull as their version of god), and might have appeared more than ten thousand years ago.
Followed by some version of Hinduism, then either the Aton cult or judaism (i've heard theories about Judaism started becoming a monotheism after an exile from egypt of Aton priests).
Assuming for argument's sake, that is.
I think there's a chasm or 10 between declining a responsibility and denouncing your faith.
Even if that were true, the two likely wouldn't be distinguishable in any meaningful way.
Self-delusion is a well researched topic. There are many studies.
The best part of this notion is the inverse where miserable people are doing happy people things.
Sartre called it “bad faith”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)
I know a lot of religious people like this. On the outside, they seem like the happiest people you’ve ever met, but once you get to know them, it turns out that they are miserable, and that the religious beliefs and behavior that they embrace are used to self-regulate their mental states. The more extreme religious people appear to be suffering a type of scrupulosity unique to disorders like OCD, and many sufferers will tell you that they are not happy.
I’d be curious to know out of the 4000 surveyed individuals the percentage that experienced nontrivial changes in religiosity and whether the life patterns/worldview (community, sense of morality, perspective of human life, personal values, daily habits, charitability, etc.) they inherited from their religion also deteriorated.