“Key to happiness? Religion. (Really.)”

http://www.johnmitsima.com/key-to-happiness-religion-really/

Thanks to Allen Wyatt for sharing this with me.

There are two deeply hostile and mocking, mostly aggressively atheist message boards that I look at fairly often.  (I like to know what’s agitating the people there.)

On one of them, there’s invariably a thread every Sunday wherein people list all the wonderful things they’re doing that day instead of attending church.

And they may well be giving an accurate summary of their Sundays.  They may really spend the first day of each week gathering berries from alpine meadows, playing Rachmaninoff, winning marathons, finishing novels, and being served breakfast in bed by their fashion-model former-Olympian spouses.

Or maybe they’re not.

But one thing is clear:  They seem to spend some amount of time each Sunday — and, it would seem, for certain of them — a rather substantial chunk of time, sitting alone in front of a computer screen expressing their anger and contempt for Mormonism and the Latter-day Saints to a similarly-minded group of invisible strangers.

Whether that’s really better than singing and serving and socializing with friends at church is a choice that everybody has to make for himself or herself.  Church isn’t always exhilaration and bliss, of course, but their alternative doesn’t, frankly, look particularly appealing to me.  It doesn’t seem healthy.  It doesn’t seem very happy.

Some justify their often insulting and sometimes quite hateful posts with the notion that they’re merely attempting to “recover” from the horrors visited upon them in their days as active believers.  They’re just using candid and blunt rhetoric — precisely as some who briefly show up in my blog comments do.  But blunt rhetoric, for too many, is just a disingenuous euphemism for what you say when you want to indulge yourself without reflecting on the impact it has on others.  Such people don’t appear to care about that impact.  They don’t seem to know or care that those they’re abusing are real.  They don’t even try to hide their rage.

Sad.  Not happy.

Posted from Cedar City, Utah