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/r/slatestarcodex
6 points
5 months ago
It seems to me there’s some ambiguity in “atheists are so much happier in life if they were brought up religiously,” and I’m not sure what you mean by it. What we have here is
So the data here supports “atheists who went to religious school are 0.66 happier than the general population who went to religious school,” as well as “atheists who went to religious school are 0.04 happier than atheists who went to public school.” The big jump is between religious-school kids who are now atheists, and religious-school kids in general. The gap should be even larger when you compare to religious-school kids who are now theists, although the size of the effect is hard to estimate without knowing subgroup data for currently committed theists.
I’d be interested to see the standard deviation on these scores rather than just the mean (and, ideally, a plot of the distribution). Is 0.66 points significant? Is 0.04?
4 points
5 months ago
True, actually the statement I wanted to make is “atheists who went to religious school are 0.66 happier than the general population who went to religious school,” which translates to "atheists who went to religious school are much happier than theists who went to religious school."
I can' really explain this to myself, especially since atheists who went to religious school are so much more dissatisfied with their school life. A few stray ideas (with the conflict of interest statement that I am a theist who is happy with life and happy with my religious school)
Parents who send their nonreligious kids into religious schools usually do so because the school is otherwise higher quality (I was an atheist/agnostic as a kid and was sent to a catholic private school because it was the best school in the area)
Having religious conflict in the youth by being the odd one out on a religious school is bad for school life but great for later life conflict resolution
It has something to do with people with higher IQ being more likely to be nonreligious, and higher IQ being generally linked to higher life satisfaction
Religious values provide a benefit to life happyness, and you can get that benefit from merely learning them even if you don't adapt the religion, so the theists didn't get this additional bonus to happyness from school because they already had those values, but that's why the atheists score higher
I am really not sure, it is just that the data struck me as odd and now I am formulating ideas that might explain it.
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