Be happy!

1 Responses to “Be happy!”

• 1 Marilyn Burge

  11/22/2006 at 1:44 am

  Admittedly, I didn’t read the entire article, but I do have a couple of comments regarding the part I did read.

  First, ‘happy’ is a very nebulous term. I doubt if you asked a dozen people the definition of that word you’d get anything approaching consenses regarding its meaning. I suspect most people go through then majority of their waking hours in a more or less neutral state of mind, being neither particularly pleased or displeased with how things are going. I’ll go even further and say that most people woulr rarely give the question any conscious thought.

  Second, I’m more than a little skeptical regarding the conclusion he drawsn regarding religiosity. People who regularly attend church can be described as being a member of a rather large club or support group. People who rarely or never attend religious services lack such a large affiliation with like-minded people, unless they have consciously sought one out, such as a bowling league, regular bridge club, or the like. And even then, a bowling or bridge club has just one thing in common, and that is that particular activity. On the other hand, people who regularly attend religious services have a commonality that encompasses their entire outlook on life, so it stands to reason that simply knowing that they have this large group of people they can turn to in times of trouble would put their minds at ease, just as grown children who know they can always turn to their parents in time of trouble know that they are not alone in their negative situation.

  Given that, comparing some nebulous mind-state between the religious and the nonreligious strikes me as comparing apples and oranges on a very fundamental level.