Shiny Happy People Laughing

  

Shiny Happy Generic Bubble

          Happy Sunday to everyone out in the WorldWideWasteofTime! I hope your day is off to a happy start wherever the hours take you today.

            Happiness has been on my mind lately, and in a moment of serendipity, I followed a link on Captain Cassidy's Roll to Disbelieve site on Patheos to a post from a few months back called "The Happiness Hucksters." She makes several good points about happiness in our culture in general and the way (at least American) Christianity grabs on to the promise of happiness to sell you their ideology.

                       

            Before I look at some the more salient quotes, I would like to distinguish two modes of happiness: a mood and an overall sense of one's life satisfaction. In our discussions more generally I feel that we conflate and confuse these two modes, and perhaps in our own minds, it can be hard to unwind which sense dominates in a given situation.

            The mood of happiness is part of our daily fluctuations of life. We might think ourselves temporarily happy when we move through the day without bumping into setbacks. The opposites of this feeling may be frustration, anger, sadness, fear or a combination of what are generally considered negative feelings. The overall sense of happiness is an assessment of how our life is going on a larger scale. We might think of a spectrum between fulfillment and disappointment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, success and failure, perceived forward or backward motion with regard to life goals. We can assess our careers, family, hobbies, friends, and really anything of importance on these scales and measure our level of happiness. Although this examination of our life looks at a macro level, the way we perceive it can shift with life events. I will be looking at these two assessments of happiness in my next posts, for now, let's return to Roll to Disbelieve.

            Captain Cassidy makes the point that overall in our culture, we seem to view happiness as not intrinsic to our lives: 

A while after deconverting, I began to notice something about these come-ons about happiness: they all treated the emotion like something separate from the rest of one's life, like something poured over life like rum over fruitcake.

While adding rum over a cake may be a good idea in baking, it is wrong-headed to think of happiness as extrinsic to our lives. Here, of course, we mean the macro picture of our life. If our job, families, friends, hobbies, whatever is/are causing frustrations on a regular basis, more than they are bringing any kind of satisfaction, we cannot attain happiness.

            She goes on to the promise that Christianity makes that believers will find this happiness if they accept Jesus into their hearts. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Christianity often promises that our life circumstances are irrelevant, the happiness we will obtain is beyond this worldly realm. "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5) after all. The kind of happiness promised is indeed poured on like the rum of the baking metaphor above. And it is this promise of happiness to come despite our current circumstances that we are supposed to buy into.

            In addition, given the Christian doctrine of grace, believers are supposed to find a serenity. Yes, they are imperfect sinners, but god, in his infinite grace, loves and forgives them. This is supposed to lead to a kind of happiness in the here and now, the peace of mind of knowing you are making a good Pascal's Wager. Captain Cassidy points out that this kind of happiness is a sales technique that Christians deploy:

Christians know that the appearance of happiness is one of the most important traits they could possibly display. They know that their religions' major marketing thrust centers around its ability to make adherents happy. They know their mythology declares repeatedly that TRUE CHRISTIANS^TM should be, above all, happy.

  
And truly if there were a god, one would think that believers should be happy - both in the life satisfaction sense and in the mood sense. I mean, if an all-loving deity sees your dedication, it should want to reward you (despite all the mysterious ways it operates). As Captain Cassidy says, and I will explore in my next posts, this is not the case. Indeed, you can even consult the World Happiness Report and see how more secular nations are happier. If you look at reasons people give, religion is not a factor.

            True, many Christians will say that their belief in their god makes them happy, but that does not translate into happiness in other areas. "What does atheism offer?" they sometimes ask. Christianity supposedly offers all these benefits. Any rational atheist who has arrived at their position through skepticism and reason would dismiss the question with a shrug. One does not become an atheist because it has purported benefits, as Captain Cassidy says:

I didn't leave Christianity because I was miserable, and I'm not a non-Christian because it makes me happy. I left Christianity because it isn't objectively true, and I didn't want to be part of a tribe as harmful as Christians are if their claims aren't even true. Nor do I hold my current ideology because it makes me happy but because it fits with the reality I can observe around myself and the sum total of human scientific progress.

Interesting enough, in identifying as an atheist, nothing really changed about my level of happiness. My moods did not improve or worsen. Christianity did not make me happier, and becoming an atheist didn't give me more satisfaction. The label just corresponded to who I was more.

            I said in one of my first posts that I do not see my atheism as being a journey or a walk. I would go on to say that atheism is also separate from any happiness I feel. What atheism does, however, is removes an irrational doctrine from consideration. I have no obligation to feel happy because I think my belief requires it, and if I am unhappy, it is not because I'm "doing my faith wrong." My happiness is a gauge of some aspect of my life. I can make adjustments here and now, I can plan for the future, but I cannot rely on some supernatural force to blanket solve my problems.