Irony

[Astonished]

A thought has just comed to my mind. My family practises religion, because imaginig that a god exists makes them feel happy. Dad is very into this thing, he makes the sign of cross every time he sees a church, he likes to talk about religion and so on. Inspite all of that, he is almost constantly nervous, paranoid and has anger issues. I'm atheist and I'm the other extreme, I have difficulties because I'm too happy sometimes. I have happy thoughts most of the time, I like to think about jokes I've heard and fiction. There are many times when I smile alone in public, though I'm trying to controll it. I laugh alot when I'm alone in my room and I also like to jump. I tell alot of jokes to my family. Sometimes I have problems to concentrate when I'm learning, but they don't occur very often , and they're very mild, almost nonexisting. I might have a mild case of ADHD if I think about it. It seems that your level of happines depends more on your personality and upbringing rather than faith.

Cognitive. Dissonance. It's vicious.

This is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of their lopsided doctrine. God is simultaneously loving and merciful and yet hates us for our sins and threatens us with hell. My friend's elderly mother was horrified of dying for exactly that reason; having a belief in something awaiting you after death is a scary fucking prospect and when no one has ever come up with a half-decent idea of what the fuck heaven is actually like but have painted hell with oh-so-great detail, well, that guilt's going to catch up to you (not that it's helpful that the deck is so stacked against us that no one is incapable of committing a 'sin'). Their anti-outgroup doctrine encourages them to look at non-believers or members of other faiths as deluded or deliberately wicked for rejecting their just-as-stupid bullshit. What can anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of psychology conclude will be the result of this kind of thing?

You're very lucky they weren't able to indoctrinate you. You sound like you would be all the worse for juggling around that inside your head when you're mentioning having other issues already.

Anyone who claims their faith makes them happy misses the point; you could replace faith with literally anything as long as it makes you happy. It need not be something preposterous nor psychologically cancerous as most doctrines are. Also using other things is far less likely to result in your father's sort of 'side effects'.

Religion really is like taking a medicine that causes the harshest possible side effects, has a dubious success rate and is made from very unhealthy ingredients rather than a far more natural, side-effect-free and nearly 100% effective alternate medication. It's the worst idea for solving any problem yet people are convinced otherwise, and a bit more like something you take for an imagined illness rather than a genuine one and believing the non-existent symptoms are cleared up by it when there's never been any for them to treat. The most unfortunate part is that children are force-fed this rather than being allowed to grow up uninfected by this virus of the mind.