Christianity and Happiness

       I love you, too, Elaine, fond memories.  And I love arguing.  I taught for 50 years and felt it necessary to keep my personal opinions at bay.  Now that I am fully retired, I feel liberated, free to tell the truth as I see it. 

         I quite disagree that what is venomous and vile is in the eye of the beholder.  When the author accuses Christians of worshiping the idol of fear, their being defeatists, alarmists, prone to lazy stereotypes, freaked out over school prayer policy (Wait a minute isn’t that the atheists that freak out over crosses and prayers?) and blog rants (in a rather cruel blog rant), he definitely paints a picture of some decidedly miserable and unhappy people.  Look at the picture with which he chooses to illustrate the piece, a demon possessed maniac made up like a ghoul.

         And this is not true of Christians at all.  There have been at least 8 research projects done on the issue, all of which show that there is a positive relationship between religion and happiness.   Pacific Standard analyzed 877,000 tweets from 7500 very conservative Christians and more than a million tweets from 8700 Atheists. Using the computerized text analysis program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count they concluded that “Christians express more happiness than atheists in everyday language.”