From: vanweer@ecf.toronto.edu (VANWEERDENBURG NICHOLAS JOHN)
Subject: The Effect of Relgion 
Organization: University of Toronto, Engineering Computing Facility
Distribution: world,public
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 06:00:07 GMT

In article <SCG.93Jan4185701@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> scg@mentor.cc.purdue.edu writes:
>muehlhau@en.ecn.purdue.edu (John Muehlhausen) writes:
>>From everything I have seen, the Bible believer is generally a
>>happier, more joyful, more hopeful, and more successful individual in
>>life than the person who rejects Biblical advice and command.
>
>actually, i've seen well-adapted, rational christians.  i've seen very
>badly messed up christians.  i've seen well-adapted, rational
>non-christians.  i've seen badly messed up non-christians.  i haven't
>noticed any perceptible correlation between being well-adapted and
>being christian.
>
>perhaps it's because you don't meet the well-adapted non-christians,
>or you never find out they're non-christian?
>
>i will point out that the bible encourages the physical abuse of
>children, something which is said to cause psychological problems.
>

To the poster #1 above, my additions to poster# 2:
I'll add that I have no clue whether most of the people I meet are religious
or not.  It doesn't come up.  However, since most people are religious in this
world ( or better said, claim to be- by their own defintions most 'religious' people are horrendously hypocritical ) it stands to reason that most successful people you meet call themselves religious.  I doubt you know enough people well enough to make a statment that non-believers are generally worse off.  However, I would say that a lot of depressed people I know are in such a state because relgious upbringing and a religous society made them feel alienated and left them no other way to deal with the uni



verse, even though they could come to terms with the religion they were bombarded with.

An aside: when I was fourteen I go depressed searching for purpose.  I concluded
that living was purpose enough and how would having a god give more purpose?
That wasn't reasonabe.  What purpose was beyond god, and how could being some
ones creation= purpose.  If anything that was a negative thing.
          when I was twenty I realized that the only reason that I searched for
purpose was that I felt there should be one and the only reason I felt that 
there should be purpose was that I was taught by western society that there
had to be a purpose.  From the time I was born, the message was being bombarded
on me that there had to be a purpose.  Similarly, I was taught nudity was bad,
death was to be feared, insects were scary, and commies were bad.  None of this
very explicitly but very implicitly and heavily.  When I realized that I was
taught there HAD to be purpose, and that it wasn't a logical thing as I had
assumed, but an emotional one, it no longer meant a thing to be. It was almost
a religious experience, and since that day I've been a totally free man and a 
stronger sense of vitality has filled my philsophy and my life.  
         I'll hypothesis here and say that religion often works by filling
a strong need in people that its presense in society creates in the first
place.  And sure, with lots of people, the soothing of that need or neurosis
can make their life easier to live.  But so can drugs or a lobotomy, and for
me personally there is a certain beauty and nobility to the truth, and that
if we lack in truth, we lack in our humanity.
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