Are Believers Really Happier Than Atheists?

Are Believers Really Happier Than Atheists?
Who is better off: the religious or atheists? Cultural values determine the answer

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=healthy-skepticism

• Being religious is often linked with greater well-being. New research suggests that the effect is culture-specific.
• A strong predictor of a person’s religiosity is the condition of the society in which he or she lives.
• Finding communities and social groups that align with your beliefs can improve life satisfaction.

A heathen manifesto

Atheists are too often portrayed as bishop-bashing extremists and any meaningful debate with the religious becomes impossible. How can this be remedied? At the Guardian Open Weekend, Julian Baggini presented his 12 rules for heathens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/atheists-please-read-heathen-manifesto

1 Why we are heathens
2 Heathens are naturalists
3 Our first commitment is to the truth
4 We respect science, not scientism
5 We value reason as precious but fragile
6 We are convinced, not dogmatic
7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen
8 We are secularists
9 Heathens can be religious
10 Religion is often our friend
11 We are critical of religion when necessary
12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others

"It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.
We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them."

belief and politics : making God in man's image

Always interesting to see cognitive dissonance at work, in this case in how both sides of the political divide interpret Jesus in line with their own biases. Of course like all scriptures the Bible is remarkably accomodating on that front, since between the slaughter-your-son-just-to-honour-me savagery of the old testament and the turn-the-other-cheek humility of the new, something for every stripe of philosophy.

"A study led by Lee Ross of Stanford University in California has found that the Jesus of liberal Christians is very different from the one envisaged by conservatives. 
The researchers discovered that conservatives believe Jesus would have prioritised the moral issues close to their own hearts, and that disparities in wealth or the treatment of illegal immigrants wouldn't have been high on his agenda. Liberals believed the opposite."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/mar/04/jesus-liberals-conservatives
However, overall the conclusion is quite depressing, given the role religion plays in US politics, then one might at least have hoped it might have provided some common ground for debates, but as this shows, belief is personal, and personally biased.

Julian Baggini on secularism

Julian Baggini in the Guardian makes a valid point that secularism shouldn't ultimately be about stamping out religion, it's about moving it from the public, political sphere into the private. However since this  often requires the displacement of one particular religion from a priviledged position then this can make those of the related sect feel persecuted (with no sense of irony in the case of the catholic church, but then I guess no one expects the Spanish Inquisition :-). But preventing the views of one section of society from dominating the whole is not persecution, it is democratic tolerance, especially when most of the people labelled as belonging to that section don't seem to actually fully agree or take seriously the official beliefs ascribed to them. Which is why as he says "in theory, if not in practice, the United States is both culturally the most religious country in the developed west and constitutionally the most secular."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/is-religion-really-under-threat

In addition Baggini makes the importance case (originally fromJohn Rawls) that preventing religious beliefs from being grounds for action in modern democratic societies does not mean that they can't be acknowledged as motivations. People should be allowed believe what they want, but as in all areas, when it comes to the interaction with others (e.g. via the laws of that society) then other justifications are needed "If we're debating the ethics of abortion, for example, we'd get nowhere if some insisted their views rested on their Catholic faith whereas others took theirs to flow inexorably from their atheism. What we all need to do is provide reasons that have some purchase for other people in their capacity as fellow citizens, whatever their world-views. That doesn't mean denying or even covering up the fact that we have religious or other motivations for believing what we do. It is simply to acknowledge that we can't expect these to carry any weight with others."

(update 2012-02-19)
Related to this is the letter exchanged between Richard Dawkins and Will Hutton in this weeks Observer, sparked by the survey conducted by Dawkins' foundation which showed most people who would have registered themselves as 'Christian' in the latest UK senses, do so only on a very loose basis, and hence that it is unfair to use the census figure of 72% self-identified Christians to support the notion that the UK is an 'actively' Christian country.

John Gray on Alain de Botton's atheist temple

An interesting article by John Gray on de Botton's new Atheism, which provides some historical insight into the quest for something to capture what religion inspires, without accepting what it implies.

Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/02/alain-de-botton-atheist-temple-defunct

but as always the enduring role of religious art and structures as a focal point for human thoughts about existence was I think best put by Larkin in his poem Churchgoing :
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Divine prejudice

Unfortunately it seems people assume not believing a in deity watching over us makes atheists less trustworthy.  But the article mentions some interesting experiments examining this, not only because the distrust could be reduced (reminding people of secular authorities such as the police made them seemingly more open to the idea that people didn't need a holy policeman) but also seem to provide some insights into how different societies might be more or less condusive to atheism.
In Atheists We Distrust: Scientific American

Atheism 2.0

I've often felt that even if one doesn't accept the mysterious supernatural tenets of religions, they are such developed and functional institutions that there is a lot to be reclaimed from then. Not only because religions have arisen and persisted because they tap into important elements of our nature, feelings of community and awe etc., but also because they have perfected many techniques that means they can harnass significant power to have an effect (albeit for bad as well as good) on the world. As this lecture discusses, this is in stark contrast to their generally individual and uncoordinated secular counterparts (artists, philosophers, even film makers) who also try to provide comment and guidance about 'higher' things, but often with much less effect.  As de Botton says, there is a lot secular society can learn, and religion is too important to be left to the religious...

TED: Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 - Alain de Botton (2011)