Can religion make you happier?
How four religions shape up against the five happiness muscles.
I was Christened. Not by choice. I’m neither atheist, nor agnostic. I believe we are all tiny fragments of Universal Consciousness and Universal Conscious Creator (UC and UCC. You see, see?) Ego is the opposite. I like the Edging God Out interpretation, or ESO: Edging Soul Out.
Each religion is a school of people, rituals, robes and writings that purport to lead to a connection with God, soul or spirit. But Catholic, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, are group identities and labels. By definition they are abstract. Enter ego: a paranoid creation of imagination, terrified of not existing and craving a group identity (and abstract labels and material possessions) to help prove its existence.
But the only group an ego can belong to is a group ego.
I have spent the last six years studying happiness around the world. I discovered happiness means connecting well with existence (and others) and that there are five muscles that help you do it. These five muscles exercise the soul, whereas ego drives disconnection and unhappiness. I called my book The Happiness Animal because the word ‘Animal’ derives from the latin ‘Anima,’ meaning spirit. Here’s my rundown of how four religions shape up when it comes to exercising that spirit.
Muscle 1: Honesty
I ran a survey of 700 people globally, polling the best definition of happiness. Trust and Confidence won the majority vote.
‘Distance yourself from words of falsehood,’ is the Torah’s abstract and non-specific way of saying ‘don’t lie and avoid people that do’. In practice there’s a prevalent Hebrew phrase, ‘shitat matzliach,’ meaning: when it comes to succeeding, anything goes.
For Hindus the Taittririya Upanishad deems that our conduct should “be marked by truthfulness in word, deed, and thought.” Marking thoughts with truthfulness is about as possible as hand-swatting all the mosquitoes in India. The irony is that “shoulding” — — a highly prevalent term among all religions — — -is an example of moralizing: trying to model your existence around rules that your ego identifies with. Ego is just a creation of our…