STUDY: Want ‘sustained happiness’? Get religion.

[Aractus]

You could have read the paper abstract (which he linked to) and that alone would have told you where the data came from. And the data is clear that Religion is the only social activity of the ones studied that had a positive health outcome across all areas of Europe for the participants in the study. Although there was some limited benefit for some of the others noting that data-mining the data will result in eventually finding a false-positive (a positive association by chance), so they cannot then decide to break it down to the per-country level as that wouldn't be objective.

Also, it's peer-review published in a respected journal. Why on Earth would you have claimed the study is BS in the first place? It is very rare for a BS study to get published in such a journal...

I thought the article itself was very interesting, PM me if you want to read it in full.

I'm talking about the article he posted explaining that study suggested religion leads to sustained happiness, I was not able to read the actual study, so the only thing I had to go on was the article he posted. The abstract really doesn't tell me much, because my beef was based on the article suggesting that religion leads to sustained happiness. I believe you that study does not suggest that religion leads to sustained happiness, but the article's analysis of the study is that it does and that was my whole beef.

No, he posted the abstract as well. The abstract does tell you where the data comes from. I didn't read the Washington Post article, but just going by the first paragraph it's wrong. The paper has nothing to say about "joining" a religion for health benefits. It had to do with participation and the study was longitudinal, it had nothing to do with "joining" social groups for health benefits.

Fourth, you highlighted the following paragraph from the study (btw, you must have some formal background in this, yes?):

"Earlier research found that religiously active persons have better mental health than the religiously inactive (24, 42). Our findings suggest that this association might reflect a causal association. Participation in religious organizations may protect mental health through several pathways, including influencing lifestyle, enhancing social support networks, and offering a mechanism for coping with stress (24, 42). For example, religion has been shown to serve as a coping mechanism during a period of illness in late life (43, 44). Through participation in religious activities, people may also become more attached to their communities, which prevents social isolation, a predictor of old-age depression. Spirituality has also been proposed as an important promoter of mental health, but this construct is not well defined, and its relationship with depression is not well understood (24). By contrast, people may not accrue the same social support, lifestyle, and coping benefits from participating in sports, social clubs, or other kinds of clubs, which may explain why these forms of social participation did not predict levels of depressive symptoms 4 years later. Although we expected stronger associations between social participation and depressive symptoms in Northern and Western European countries, the lack of regional differences in the associations across Europe supports the findings of Di Gessa and Grundy (17)." (pp. 173-174)

Maybe I've missed your point, but nothing in that paragraph sounds bad to me...

As I have stated elsewhere in this forum, God is not interested in our happiness; He is interested in our holiness. If we are also happy in this life, that's a bonus.

That paragraph is not a conclusion, you need to exercise caution when discussing the findings notice the use of "might" and "may" not "does" or even "likely".