Survivorship bias. Especially for high-demand religions, answering "no" means admitting the church you make so many sacrifices for does absolutely nothing. This leaves those who are either too afraid to confront the cognitive dissonance or who were already happy in the first place.

> Especially for high-demand religions, answering "no" means admitting the church you make so many sacrifices for does absolutely nothing.

I think there's a chasm or 10 between declining a responsibility and denouncing your faith.

Where do you get the premise of religion being a happier life?

For most faithful, the answer would be 'experience'. People happy in their faith tend to stay. Those who aren't tend to leave eventually.

I never said it was, I'm not sure why you think I did.

Your answer of "survivorship bias" hints that you are assuming the parent's "are you happy" is a yes.

Assuming for argument's sake, that is.

The post title implies religiosity != happiness, the parent implied other results might differ, my comment was a response to that possibility, for the sake of argument as you said.

Reverse causality or unobserved confounds. Maybe happy people are more likely to become or stay religious. Maybe living in an area with strong community makes you happier and you also get dragged along to church (but the two do not influence each other).

Believing you are happy and actually being happy are different things. Religious people believe that they're happier than other people, but they're not.

>Believing you are happy and actually being happy are different things

Even if that were true, the two likely wouldn't be distinguishable in any meaningful way.

Yes they would. If you ask people if they're happy they'll say yes. If you actually measure it by observing what people do they'll exhibit behavior that shows they're not actually happy.

Self-delusion is a well researched topic. There are many studies.

> If you actually measure it by observing what people do they'll exhibit behavior that shows they're not actually happy.

The best part of this notion is the inverse where miserable people are doing happy people things.

> The best part of this notion is the inverse where miserable people are doing happy people thing

Sartre called it “bad faith”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)

I know a lot of religious people like this. On the outside, they seem like the happiest people you’ve ever met, but once you get to know them, it turns out that they are miserable, and that the religious beliefs and behavior that they embrace are used to self-regulate their mental states. The more extreme religious people appear to be suffering a type of scrupulosity unique to disorders like OCD, and many sufferers will tell you that they are not happy.

link? is that in the study?