It turns out having a community and feeling of purpose in life actually has tangible benefits, who would've thought.

Joining a group that believes in magical sky dwelling beings that grant eternal life in utopia provided you worship them enough isn’t the only path to community and purpose.

Yet I challenge you to find one more effective.

Whether by force/dogma or voluntary, a uniformly religious community connects at least weekly and includes all. Through this meeting, you get to know pretty much everybody, what they do, their families, their businesses. Which serves as a platform for making friends, finding partners, business opportunities, the like.

But it's one of many, and is one of the simplest ways to join a community as they are literally everywhere.

For the time/effort needed to join this community (plural), its pretty much free, maintenance isn't all that much either. People a few hundred years ago already did the hard part.

Not a bad deal. And all you have to do is suspend a little disbelief in something for a while.

It isn’t but we haven’t found another system that works as well yet. The delusion really gives purpose to life. We haven’t found another way to provide a comparable delusion.

The delusion is also a "costly signal" that you're committed to the group.

What do you mean by costly?

maybe, but it's still a pretty easy way to do it

Or it could be that a sky demon bestows blessings on the cultists who worship it. You never do know!

This has been debunked in general if I recall. It turned out only to be true for the majority religion in a region (and not help for others), and then turned out to be the social connections got people better services and health support. Religion was not useful for the effect.

It sounds weird they say 4 to 14 years. What does that mean? Does it mean on average it adds 8 years? But since this is all about averages anyway why not just state the average?

Or does it mean always 4 and never more than 14?

4-14 is probably something like the 95% confidence interval

We live in a timeline where conspiracy theorists turn out to be right and now this.

Do weekly planning meetings count?