Why make stupid unsustainable arguments?

[Aractus]

They have no evidence for what Evie? They have abundance of evidence for some things, including that religious people tend to be happier and healthier.

Statistics on that? Also, regarding religious people being happier and healthier, I could also say that since a comparison is being made there, that if you look at the majority of people in prison, most of them are religious. Here let me get some statistics on that: 

This link shows a nice article complete with statistics on every religion and on atheism and the percentage of prisoners in each category. 

See? This is a factual claim I am making. You are asserting that religious people tend to be happier and healthier. Where is your proof? Also, based on the facts above, religious people also tend to engage in more criminal activity than atheists do.

You can look it up easily in peer-review literature, as I said there's an abundance of evidence and it's easy to find. In fact it's so widely known and accepted (especially in the field of psychiatry) that academics often say it as if it's common-knowledge that doesn't need further explanation. But yes, there is clear peer-review evidence that shows people who participate in their religion see health benefits that are unexplained simply by the fact that it's a "social activity". See the link in my sig to Williams & Sternthal (2007).

Criminality is a different matter to health and happiness, so even if it's true that atheism reduces the likelihood of a person serving a custodial sentence (which isn't what your data shows anyway), it doesn't mean that it in any way obliterates the benefits associated with religious participation.

You didn't notice that 'religious people tend to be happier and healthier' is a catch-all claim?

Not at all, it's supported by the majority of peer-review evidence, and I didn't make a catch-all claim I made an accurate summary of the evidence. A catch-all claim would be to say that in every instance religion improves people's health and happiness - and that isn't true. But it does tend to be true at the population level.

The way I see it, regardless of whether it's true or not whether religious people are happier and healthier or not it's completely fucking irrelevant.

Why? What's your definition of "relevance"?

They have abundance of evidence for some things, including that religious people tend to be happier and healthier.

And there's significant evidence that that is not, in fact, the case:

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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674679908406340

The aim of the present work was to test for an association between religiosity and happiness... It was found that higher scores on the Francis Scale were associated with higher scores on the DHS, the OHI, the PIL, and the ISA, providing evidence for a positive association between religiosity and these facets of subjective well-being. However, partial correlations suggested that the association between religiosity and happiness is a function of purpose in life.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/713675504

A number of recent studies have consistently reported a positive association between religiosity and happiness, when happiness is operationalised in terms of the Oxford Happiness Inventory and religiosity is operationalised in terms of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. However, this general finding is not consistent across other measures of either construct. The present aim was to examine the generalisability of the link between religion and happiness using the Francis Scale and the Depression-Happiness Scale. Among two samples (Anglican priests and members of the Anglican Church), no significant associations were found between scores on the religiosity and happiness measures. Further research is now required to clarify the components of happiness that are associated with the Francis Scale.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...6997889106

The aim of the present work was to test for an association between religiosity and happiness... The present data provide no evidence that, among two samples of undergraduate students, religious people are happier.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023...234#page-2

A sample of 331 students completed German editions of the Oxford Happiness Inventory and the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity...  These data provide no evidence for a relationship between religiosity and happiness among German students, contrary to the conclusions of the recent studies that have employed the same indices in the UK and in the USA.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023...485#page-1

Robins and Francis (1996) note that the relationship between religiosity and happiness varies according to the precise measures used and the sample studies.  The further explore the association between religiosity and happiness, 154 North Irish undergraduate students completely the Depression-Happiness Scale and a measure of frequency of church attendances.  No significant association was found between a greater frequency of church attendance and happiness scores...

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So if you're talking about uninformed arguments annoying you, you just walked into one.

There are problems with the studies you've linked to. The biggest one is they're not representative of the populations where the people live: they're all done on university students, thus their generalisability is quite limited, and the studies themselves are very small. But the other problem is that it's not going to necessarily hold 100% true everywhere in the world, and the effect would reasonably be expected to be lower in some areas and higher in others. We see this with EVERYTHING. For example, the social gradient, for some reason, has a substantially lower effect on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health than it does on other Australian's health; but it is still there and measurable (see Shepherd, Li, & Zubrick, 2012). But even if it wasn't, that doesn't mean that Marmot is wrong: it's been well observed and documented in other places as a significant determinant of health.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that the weight of literature shows there is an effect, and cherry picking a few micro-studies that contradict the findings isn't going to change that.