Essay On Religion And Happiness

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religion and happiness. Religion is ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or Gods’ and ‘a particular system of faith and worship’. Happiness, simply means ‘a state of being happy which is ‘a feeling or showing pleasure or contentment’. Life satisfaction is ‘an overall assessment of feelings and attitudes about one’s life at a particular point in time ranging from negative to positive’which is a concept related to happiness. First, religion is positively correlated to the life-satisfaction and happiness. According to Inglehart’s study on 160,000 European in 1990, 85 percent of the weekly chruchgoers felt very satisfied with their lives while 77 percent of the people who never went to church felt very satisfied. This study indicates that religious people have a higher level of life-satisfaction than non-religious people. Besides, The Office for National Statistics, an official ‘well being’ statistics did a study on the relationship between religion and well being in 2010.…show more content…
According to Steger and Frazier’s study in 2005, 512 students from a Midwestern university in the United States are recruited to test the hypothesis of ‘Meaning in life is a mediator of the link between religiousness and psychological health’. The result was that the religious people may feel greater well-being as they derive meaning in life from their religious feelings and activities. The result supports the existence of a positive relationship between religion and meaning in life. Religion itself motivates people to strive for their goals in lives. For example, the ‘meaning of life’ in Christianity is to glorify and worship God and pursue an everlasting life in heaven. For Buddhism, the meaning of life is to end suffering and seek happiness. Religion advocates people to seek meanings of lives from their own beliefs and pursuit their ultimate goal,
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