{"id":931,"date":"2008-12-18T15:51:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T23:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=931"},"modified":"2008-12-18T15:51:50","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T23:51:50","slug":"does-religion-make-you-nicer-or-happier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/does-religion-make-you-nicer-or-happier\/","title":{"rendered":"Does religion make you nicer or happier?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it may depend on where you live — which in turn suggests that the answer may be more complicated than many assume, if not indeterminate. Paul Bloom in Slate last month<\/a>, via Will Wilkinson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll<\/a>, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger that morality requires a belief in God\u2014otherwise, all we have is our selfish desires. …<\/p>\n

And, indeed, there is evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion and what might broadly be called “niceness.” In Gross National Happiness<\/a><\/em>, Arthur Brooks notes that atheists are less charitable than their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example, and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the street. Since giving to charity makes one happy, Brooks speculates that this could be one reason why atheists are so miserable. In a 2004 study, twice as many religious people say that they are very happy with their lives, while the secular are twice as likely to say that they feel like failures….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So people in deeply secularized countries are less nice and less happy than Americans, right? No, they aren’t. “It is at this point,” writes Bloom, “that the ‘We need God to be good’ case falls apart.” One study of democracies finds that the less religious ones have lower rates of social dysfunction, while a newer book on Denmark and Sweden, by some measure the world’s most unbelieving countries, finds that they score very highly on “niceness”, low crime rates, social cohesion, and so forth. (Yes, it would be great to adjust in part for cultural and ethnic variables by running a comparison to, say, Scandinavian-Americans in Minnesota, rather than Americans generally. But at the least the evidence tends to contradict the “take away religion and things begin reverting to barbarism” hypothesis. If the objection is raised that Scandinavian-Americans have no great intensity of belief these days either, then you have to ask why their indicators of social health, too, remain so high).<\/p>\n

One hypothesis Bloom lays out is that in America, where church commitment is a leading (if not the leading) way people form communities with each other, being an unbeliever tends to mean being an outsider, which in turn tends to correlate with unhappiness, lack of social support, and dysfunction. Where an entire country has moved away from religious belief, on the other hand, it seems that either other supportive forms of community move into the gap, or churches themselves alter their role to one in which unbelievers can participate more comfortably. In his new study of Scandinavia, Society Without God<\/a><\/em>, Phil Zuckerman finds (according to Bloom) that in Sweden and Denmark the Lutheran churches continue to serve many valued functions as social institutions; it’s just that most of the congregants no longer believe in the churches’ notional theology. One wonders whether any of the more liberal denominations in the U.S. are evolving, or have already evolved, in that direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it may depend on where you live — which in turn suggests that the answer may be more complicated than many assume, if not indeterminate. Paul Bloom in Slate last month, via Will Wilkinson: Many Americans doubt the morality … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[54,57],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":932,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions\/932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}