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20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

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Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#51

Post by paulryanrogers »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #3

“ Meta-analyses have pointed to a positive relationship between religiosity and a person’s evaluation of their life, suggesting that people who are more religious tend to feel better about their lives. But researcher Mohsen Joshanloo remarks that these studies have not offered strong evidence of a causal relationship between the two variables. “ E.g. maybe happy people are more likely to be religious, but like with m…

> My favorite stat is that weekly church goers report the highest satisfaction in their sex lives.

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

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#53

Post by jkhdigital »

Is there any major religion which has an expressly stated purpose of increasing the “life satisfaction” of its adherents? I mean, hard to fault religion for failing to deliver something that it never really promised in the first place.

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#55

Post by krapp »

coding123 wrote: post #54

As more people lose faith, you have higher numbers of people that have faith in only themselves. What replaces morality? I haven't seen a large movement to replace it.

Morality doesn't presuppose religion, faith or belief in the supernatural. The religious can be amoral and selfish, atheists can be moral and selfless.

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#56

Post by geoduck14 »

jkhdigital wrote: post #53

Is there any major religion which has an expressly stated purpose of increasing the “life satisfaction” of its adherents? I mean, hard to fault religion for failing to deliver something that it never really promised in the first place.

>Is there any major religion which has an expressly stated purpose of increasing the “life satisfaction” of its adherents?

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".

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#57

Post by geoduck14 »

jawns wrote: post #48

I am a member of a religious group whose doctrine, practices, culture, etc. are very different from the doctrine, practices, and culture of other religious groups. Some people who identify as religious are monotheists, others polytheists, others pantheists, and still others agnostics or even atheists. (Yup, there is such a thing as Christian atheism.) So I always find it strange when 'religiosity' is used as a catch-…

>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!

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#58

Post by jkhdigital »

LatteLazy wrote: post #45
dustingetz wrote: post #6

The point of religion is to solve civilization-scale game theory coordination dilemmas. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a mutually beneficial metastable equilibrium but is only stable to the extent that it is a universally adopted principle. A lot of modern tragedies like climate change can be tackled in this way if we can establish universal shared values that apply to all people independent of nationality, status and in p…

Except that problem is already solved by a bunch of things like empathy and reputation. 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 a…

Meanwhile, the largest mass exterminations of humanity in the 20th century were carried out by regimes that expressly forbid the open practice of most religions.

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.

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#59

Post by jkhdigital »

dustingetz wrote: post #31
netizen-936824 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"The point of religion is..." Citation please

Myerson, Roger B. 2009. "Learning from Schelling's Strategy of Conflict." Journal of Economic Literature, 47 (4): 1109-25. http://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/research/stratofc.pdf "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 divi…

Well played.

Re: 20Y study finds little evidence religiosity leads to greater life satisfaction

#60

Post by PeterisP »

nassimsoftware wrote: post #50

I find this study problematic because it fails to take into account that life satisfaction is highly dependent on the exact moment when the respondents answers the questionnaire even if 10 years apart. 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 t…

You solve for random noise like that simply by looking at sufficiently large number of respondents, that's how basic statistics works. Any particular respondent may have an unusually bad or good day, however, if there would be some real difference of a few percent in happiness conditional on religiosity, then given 4000 respondents it's extremely unlikely that the average responses would not reveal that.
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