[crassus]

Indeed, religion makes you happier[1], so its strange the author left it out of his ten points

""[9] and a review of 498 studies published in peer-reviewed journals concluded that a large majority of them showed a positive correlation between religious commitment and higher levels of perceived well-being and self-esteem and lower levels of hypertension, depression, and clinical delinquency.[12] A meta-analysis of 34 recent studies published between 1990 and 2001 found that religiosity has a salutary relationship with psychological adjustment, being related to less psychological distress, more life satisfaction, and better self-actualization.[13] Finally, a recent systematic review of 850 research papers on the topic concluded that "the majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being (life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and higher morale) and with less depression, suicidal thoughts and behavior, drug/alcohol use/abuse."[14]"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_happiness

[marcosdumay]

I'd try an hypothesis that religion gives a huge fixed amount of happiness, at the cost of a small amount of unhappiness that slowly accumulates through the entire life, and even through generations.

Looks like the most logical outcome for me, but I don't know how to test it - or even if there is enough data in the world to test it now. Anyway, the usual correlation is not causality applies here.

[crassus]

Given that the vast majority of all people that have ever lived have been religious, your hypothesis is going to be very hard to test. Now what do we call untestable beliefs?

[nbouscal]

> religion makes you happier

In this case the distinction between correlation and causation is actually very important. The alternative causal chain, that happy people are more likely to become religious, is highly plausible. Further, there are myriad plausible confounding variables. In many cases correlation can be taken as evidence of causation, but in this particular case it really should not be.

[6d0debc071]

Religion isn't necessarily something you can believe in if you're set up to reason in certain ways. Someone whose response is going to be, 'Where is the evidence and to how many places?' is not going to be able to create such a belief.

By the time people are adults, if they haven't grown up with religion, I suspect the response to such a commandment would be something along the lines of 'That instruction set isn't implemented on this architecture - and I'm not sure I can, or would like, to become the sort of architecture where it can be.'

So, that might be one line of thought as to why it was left out.