Why religion makes you happier, more moral, and more productive
Why I (an agnostic person) envy religious people. Plus, 3 uncomfortable truths, and some extremely cynical Darwinistic opinions about humanity. Enjoy!
I grew up in liberal California, where everybody made fun of religion. Today I envy religious people.
My parents, my parents' friends, my teachers, and my classmates all said that religion was "irrational".
And I read Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion, which argued that belief in God was a form of mental illness.
I believed them until I was 18, when I worked as a door to door salesman and most of my coworkers were Mormons. I noticed that these Mormons, who believed in a crazy religious story I could never personally believe in, were happier, more moral, more productive people than the liberals who made fun of them.
The people I went to high school and college with could not handle the emotional turmoil of doing door-to-door sales. But the Mormons could.
The people I went to high school and college with were self-centered. The Mormons were kind, and they'd give you the shirt off their backs.
The people I went to high school and college with were depressed. The Mormons were some of the happiest people I ever met.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it strikes me that being religious makes you better at hard jobs. In addition to door-to-door sales, many great NFL quarterbacks (another difficult job) are religious, including Peyton Manning, Derek Carr, and Philip Rivers.
For a long time I wondered why Mormons were better suited for real life than atheists, even though the Mormons believed in a crazy religious story.
Atheists also wonder why that is. Richard Dawkins spends a whole chapter in The God Delusion saying basically “I have no idea why humans would ever evolve to delude themselves into believing in God. Why would holding false beliefs — especially false beliefs that could get you killed — be a reproductive advantage?”
Now I think I have it mostly figured out. This article is my attempt to explain why being religious is an advantage in life. It attempts to explain why being religious makes you happier, more productive, more moral, and better at surviving and reproducing than nonreligious people.
The 3 core uncomfortable truths
What atheists don't realize is that belief in the exact truth isn't always a good thing. Sometimes there is Darwinian fitness in deluding yourself.
That's because our psychology isn’t always equipped to deal with the truth. If your wife is cheating on you and you don't know, you'll still be happy, productive, and moral. Whereas learning the truth may send you into a deep depression (or a murderous rampage).
Another example: before the discovery of germs, people thought that poop, dead bodies, rancid meat, etc. had “evil spirits” and that you could avoid those evil spirits by staying away from those things. There were no evil spirits, but believing in the evil spirits helped you avoid disease. A lot of religious beliefs are similar: they’re factually false, but they lead you in the right direction.
There are many great truths about reality that are the same way. Facing these uncomfortable truths on your own will make you depressed. Understanding them deeply will make you feel profoundly lonely and afraid. When you learn them, you'll want to lie in bed all day instead of going out into the world to do shit.
Many religious teachings get you close to understanding and accepting these truths without making yourself depressed. They give you just enough truth to ground yourself in reality, but enough delusion and meaning to never want to get out of bed.
A warning
Note: in this article, I'm going to tell you these uncomfortable truths. So it's a pretty depressing article.
You may decide you don't want to read the rest of this article if you don't feel like you're emotionally ready for those truths.
On the other hand, if you are able to accept these truths and incorporate them into your worldview, it will be one of the best things you ever do. You will face a period of great pain as you accept them, as I did and as everyone else who's accepted these truths did. Once you get through the pain, you'll understand the world better, and the pain will have made you stronger.
If you keep reading and it turns out you're not emotionally ready for these truths, feel free to just reject them. After all, I'm just some crazy guy on the internet. What the hell do I know?
Anyways — here are the 3 core uncomfortable truths:
Uncomfortable Truth #1: Nobody Gives A Shit About You
Human beings have a fundamental need for friendship, community, and love.
In fact, it’s borderline unsafe to live by yourself. If you live with someone else and you have a heart attack, or you slip and take a nasty spill down the stairs, they can call 911 for you. If you live by yourself, you have to call 911 by yourself.
But friendship, community, and love are hard to come by. That's because most people usually have better things to do than provide friendship, community, and love to others.
Humans are an animal evolved by a process of Darwinian natural selection. We evolved to pass on our genes. And in most cases, we pass on our genes more successfully when we look out for ourselves instead of comforting other people.
Even your family members can't always help you. If you need to talk to someone about the girl who dumped you but your mom and dad have to work and your older brother bullies you, you're shit out of luck.
This is less true for humans than it is for other species, partially because of religion (I’ll talk about that later). But when the chips are down, most people will put their own interests ahead of yours.
I'm not blaming people for this. If your friend is going through a breakup and needs emotional support, and meanwhile you have to fly across the country for an interview to get your dream job with a 25% raise and way more vacation days, you're going to focus on the job interview and mostly ignore your friend. There's nothing wrong with that, but it'll make your friend feel like shit.
When stakes are low, people can delude themselves into thinking they have loyal friends. But when the stakes are high, you find out how loyal those friends really are.
That means it's pretty damn hard to fulfill your needs for friendship, community, and love.
The same goes for romantic love. Everyone has a fairy tale fantasy of finding the right partner, falling in love with them, and living happily ever after. Because it's pretty hard to pass on your genes if you don't.
In the real world, love involves much more pain than pleasure. People often fall in love with people who don't love them back. When you find out that the person you love doesn't love you, you'll be crushed.
Even when you get 2 people together who love each other, there's no guarantee they'll continue loving each other. Many romantic relationships end badly, either because one person betrays the other, or one person just gets bored and wants out.
More often, the 2 people will change, the love will fade, and the relationship will become a living hell. The worst in both people will emerge. And in many cases, the husband and wife will want to make each other's lives miserable, because they both blame each other for all their problems. They'll yearn for the days when they were single.
Even worse, the more you need friendship, community, and love, the harder it will be to actually find friendship, community, and love. Because your neediness will repel people. People want to be friends with winners, and winners don't feel like they need friends.
That's where God comes in.
Religion helps people cope with loneliness in 2 ways. First, religion helps people build community. When your God tells you you have to go to church every Sunday, and that same God also tells everybody else in your town that they have to go to the same church every Sunday, guess what? You get to see your friends every Sunday.
People who meet through church are also more likely to treat each other with respect and dignity, because they feel like their god and their community will punish them if they don't.
And second, even when you're all by yourself, you can still feel like your god is keeping you company.
Atheists sometimes insult religious people by calling their god an “imaginary friend”. Actually, that’s exactly what a god is, and it’s a good thing.
People need emotional support. Feeling like you’re all alone in the world is scary. But when your friends have other shit going on in their lives and can't help you, believing in God gives you somebody that you can turn to in your time of need.
This makes you less likely to turn to drugs, alcohol, or some other destructive coping mechanism. It also helps you cope with your feelings of loneliness and sadness and rebound from them sooner.
Uncomfortable Truth #2: Life Has No Meaning
Life is mostly pain.
Human beings feel negative emotions more strongly than we feel positive emotions. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself if you would allow yourself to be brutally tortured for 1 minute in exchange for getting to eat the most delicious chocolate fudge sundae of your life. Probably the pain of being brutally tortured would outweigh the pleasure of getting to eat the sundae.
Moreover, we spend more time feeling negative emotions than positive emotions. We spend 8 hours a day working, plus another 1-2 hours commuting, plus another 1-2 hours cooking dinner and doing chores around the house... only to maybe get to relax on the weekends.
If life were only about feeling pleasure and avoiding pain, it wouldn’t be worth living — because biologically, we’re wired for pain.
So instead of finding meaning from pleasure, you have to find something else in your life that has meaning. Meaning is the only thing that makes the pain worth it.
When someone feels like their life is meaningless, they go into a deep depression. Meaning is what motivates us to get stuff done. And meaning makes us happy.
But at the same time, what is the meaning of life, exactly?
The meaning of life suffers from the problem of infinite recursion: if life has some grand meaning to it, then what the hell is the meaning of the grand meaning? Why is the grand meaning so important? And if the grand meaning has a grand meaning, what's the grand meaning of the grand meaning's grand meaning? What’s the grand meaning of the grand meaning of the grand meaning of the grand meaning? (And why should we care about all these grand meanings instead of just doing whatever we want?)
The truth is that nothing has any cosmic meaning. The universe does not judge, it just is. No outcomes are good or bad, except in the context of an observer.
So human beings need meaning in their life — and at the same time, life is meaningless. What gives?
God solves the meaning problem. When you believe in God, you don't see the universe as cold, dark, and empty. Instead, you see yourself as working towards something important, even if you don't know what that something is.
In this sense, believing in God is clearly a net positive. There aren't that many decisions on Earth that you'd make differently just because you believe in God.
With a few exceptions for weird religious taboos, believing that God gives life meaning does not affect your strategic decision-making when fighting a war, the recipe you use to make ginger snap cookies, the amount of wheels you put on a vehicle, et cetera. The false belief doesn't result in you making bad decisions.
On the other hand, having meaning in your life motivates you to try harder. You might fight wars with more vigor if you believe that God needs you to win. Or you might take better care of your wife and kids.
In other words, the truth cost of holding a false belief in God is very low, and it's greatly outweighed by the additional motivation and happiness you get from giving your life a purpose.
If you don’t have God, you have to find your own meaning. That’s much harder, although not impossible.
Uncomfortable Truth #3: There Is No Such Thing As Right And Wrong
Human beings have a dark side. Most people won't admit it — to themselves or to others — but they do super unethical stuff all the time.
We do not want to confront this dark side. We want to believe that people who do bad things are simply bad people, and that people who do good things are simply good people.
But the truth is that everybody has good and bad within them. What emerges is mostly a product of your upbringing and the incentives you face.
Why? This goes back to the Darwinian stuff. You don't maximize survival and reproduction by rigidly following a moral code. Sometimes, doing something unethical helps you survive and reproduce more.
It's not as simple as "doing unethical things is optimal according to Darwinian game theory". In most cases it’s Darwinianly better to be a good person, because you never know who's watching and one moral slip can destroy your reputation. But in many cases, the human who does something unethical will get rewarded, and be more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
The way that personal ethics work in practice is that a) people have a fundamental need to believe that they're good people (except for complete sociopaths) and b) people have a fundamental need to make others think they're good people. That means people will behave badly if they can a) justify it to themselves and b) know that they'll get away with it.
A good religion blocks both of these pathways. First, religion makes your moral code much stricter. We evolved to have flexible moral consciouses, so that we could mental gymnastics our way into behaving badly and still believing that we're good people. But when your moral code is written down in a holy book, it's much harder to do that sort of mental gymnastics.
And second, religion teaches you that God is always watching you. If you believe that God is always watching you, you're much less likely to do something immoral.
(I'm not saying that religious people don't violate their moral principles — but they have a harder time violating their moral principles than a non-religious person.)
Atheists love to talk about how religious people have killed millions in holy wars, as if this means that religious people are less moral than atheists. But everybody kills each other sometimes. And viewed broadly, religious dictatorships are far less brutal than atheistic dictatorships.
Communism and Fascism had no religious principles that they had to hold themselves to. In a Communist or Fascist system, the government is God, and anything they do is morally right. They have no holy document that they have to abide by. That’s why Hitler and Stalin killed way more people than, say, Bashar Al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, who at least have to hold themselves accountable to the Qur'an.
The other uncomfortable truth about morality is that there isn’t really any objective way of saying what’s right and wrong. There isn't some universal scroll that says what the moral truth is. Right and wrong are concepts that exist in the heads of human beings. They're subjective, and they change from culture to culture.
But someone who believes this can be very dangerous. If you believe in an objective moral code, you’ll be far more trustworthy, meaning more people will want to be your friend, your business partner, you customer, your romantic partner, etc. Whereas if you just do whatever you want, without any regard to whether or not it's ethical, everybody will hate you.
Even if you find a religious person and a non-religious person with the same moral code and the same level of commitment to that moral code, the religious guy is still easier to trust. That's because it's easier for the religious person to prove that he's moral, because when people ask him what his moral code is, he can point to the specific principles he follows in his holy book. The atheist has no such book to point to, meaning people don't know whether he's lying about his principles, or changing them according to his selfish interests.
(This is one reason why people are so unwilling to vote for an atheist politician. When polled, Catholics broadly say they’re willing to vote for a Protestant, Protestants are willing to vote for a Catholic, but neither Catholics nor Protestants are willing to vote for an atheist. That's because the Catholic knows the Protestant has some moral code, even if it’s not his moral code. But neither the Catholic nor the Protestant can be sure that the atheist has a moral code. The atheist may, in fact, have a strict moral code, but the Catholics and the Protestants don’t know that.)
How to get the best of religion if you're not religious
If you're reading this article and you're not religious, don't worry. You don’t have to adopt a religion that you don't like.
You can get most of the benefits of religion by coming up with your own belief system and your own moral code.
When I feel depressed or I need strength, I say a prayer to Fonzie, the character from the situation comedy Happy Days. I do this because prayer is a useful placebo: it makes you feel better.
Studies have shown that the placebo effect can work even if you know you’re taking a placebo. I’m willing to bet that religion works the same way.
Your religion needs to give you both meaning and guidance. For meaning, think of something you really care about, like your kids or your community or scientific discovery. That’s your religious meaning. That’s the thing you're on Earth to do.
For guidance, think of a being that you think is really cool. This can be Fonzie, Albert Einstein, Buddha, Napoleon, Jordan Peterson, whomever. That's your "spirit guide". Your job is to live by the teachings of that person, and come to that person inside your mind's eye whenever you feel overwhelmed or lost and you need some emotional strength.
How to overcome the depression that the harsh truths in this article brought forth
So now you know that the world isn't as nice and cheery as we were told growing up.
But that's okay.
It's still possible to have a happy life in this world. It's just harder than you think.
Don't freak out too much. Just keep living your life the way you've always lived it. There's still lots of wonderful things in the world that make life worth living.
If you're still depressed, listen to this song. It always cheers me up:
Hey! Thanks for reading.
My name's Theo, and every other Monday I publish an article like this one about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually it has something to do with human psychology or long-term trends in society.
If you liked this article, there's more where it came from. You may enjoy this article about seeing the best in people versus seeing the worst in people:
Seeing the best in people vs. seeing the worst in people
Let me tell you a story about 2 TV characters.
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Happy trails!
For the second one, the fact that life has no meaning is actually kind of liberating. It means that you can carve out your own path in life rather than follow some divine plan.