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Comment by qwertyuiop_ | Hacker News Reader

Our brains are constantly bombarded with ever growing information and noise. With mindfulness, deliberate separation from most of the daily noise we can all zero in our own purposes in life. This hard, doesn’t happen overnight but with little steps and a lot of patience we will find that eventual purpose. And you find it hang on to it. I found reading the New Testament brings me instant peace when my brain is in turmoil. Hang in there strong with spiritual closeness, removing noise and avoiding those negative thoughts.

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You know, I don't think Jesus cures depression

To each their own. I don’t think we should judge anyone on where they find their faith, that is, the drive to keep going on. Everyone is different.

Person A might find it in nature, camping, trailing, etc. Person B might pursue a more spiritual path, giving back to the community, being of service.

Whatever floats the boat man. Live and let live.

I don't know about Jesus curing depression, but it's certainly true that belief in Jesus has made many people feel better.

It's ironic that the "acktually.." atheist/anti-theist crowd don't do a modicum of research when it comes to this kind of stuff. It's pretty well-established in the literature that folks plugged into a religious community live better, happier, and healthier lives[1].

Millenial cynicism is so boring.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5127763/

> folks plugged into a religious community live better, happier, and healthier lives

Could be:

> folks plugged into a community live better, happier, and healthier lives

Or even

> folks with a weekly routine in a third space live better, …

There’s nothing causational about the denomination.

> There’s nothing causational about the denomination.

You're right, I'm sure the people that are publishing these studies have never heard of "correlation is not causation."

Can’t wait for them to test why specific denominations have a positive causal impact on wellbeing over others. Mormons, Jehovas Witnesses, Southern Baptists, etc.

While we’re being snarky, should we talk about the people who are arbitrarily and capriciously removed from these communities during times when they need them most? Like women seeking divorce in abusive relationships while in a denomination that preaches absolute subservience to the male head of household?

... or people who attend religious services are less likely to self-report depression because of perceived weakness, shame, etc

> folks plugged into a community live better, happier, and healthier lives

It is this mainly. Community is the reason most people find happiness. Some people find it at church, some on a Sunday at a football game, some at their dnd game that’s being going on for years and some find it in their family. I am not particularly religious but I am 100% onboard the idea that community brings happiness. I find happiness in just having good neighbors.

That study you linked does not establish a causal relationship. It may simply be that the sort of person who is able to extract well-being from church is the sort of person more likely to actually attend church with any regularity. It likewise does not address the possibility that depression itself might make one want to stop attending church.

>Millenial cynicism is so boring

Yeah, it's always Millennials who are in the wrong. Fuck us, right? It's all good, we're used to being the scapegoats for society's problems.

I'm a millennial and I feel like nearly all the discourse about who is (generationally) responsible for society's problems is aimed at the boomers. And the zoomers to a lesser extent, though that seems more of a prophecy about how they're going to ruin society. Jabs aimed at us millennials tend to be that we're cringe (or boring), which I can accept.

In my opinion, this is a form of hatred.

teensy effect size according to some

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10508619.2020.17...

> Of eight R/S predictors that were distinguished, only participation in public religious activities and importance of religion were significantly related to mental health

Tell that to the gay kid who lived through god hates fags. Or the trans person today.

Speaking as a gay dude, it doesn't mean you have to follow a mainstream religion to find spirituality, especially one which tells you that you are an evil person because of who you are. Personally I've taken bits of various eastern religious beliefs which now form my 'spirituality'.

It's weird, its like there is some part of our mind that requires something spiritual to fill it, and has been that way every since recorded history. People have always looked for something higher than themselves, whether is be a god or gods, or the idea of nature or the universe, or any matter of similar ideas. And filling that part of our minds with a belief in something, seems to put the mind at ease in some ways. A lot of medical literature I've read includes 3 parts of yourself that you need to take care of: mind, body and spirit. So I really do believe there is something behind it.

Just so you know, that feeling of your brain requiring spirituality to fill it is by no means universal.

It mostly is. Just that "spiritual" doesn't automatically mean something mythical like God. It can be politics, astrology, social justice, philosophy, etc.

Something that we think is very important to us and the World and bigger than us.

That is a very odd definition of “spiritual”

How do you define spirituality such that it includes politics?

Have you not noticed the fervor with which acolytes of each 'side' preach the gospel according to their respective messiah? One can easily see similarities between sports and politics and you can't see those between religion and politics?

I see dogmatism, I don't see religion. They're not the same thing.

Otherwise, you could say my religion is BBQ because I'm always telling my friends about a smoke I just did.

We all see what we want to see I suppose. I am not buying this line of argumentation.

It's funny that exactly like those religious extremists and other extremists that associate any kind of queer person to the boogieman that tried to convert your kids and have depraved sex parades on the street, it's exactly the same attitude with people demonising any kind of religious person, as if all are the same. We all humans are the same, it's just who and what we hate and appreciate that differs.

What does this have to do with millennials?

He said something about moths and rust consuming matter and with that at the very least he pointed out quite clearly the source of our suffering in regards to the AI transformation

Not religious, but also not disputing that believers have lower rates of depression either.

Believing in a higher power has seemed to provide great comfort to a number of friends and family over the years. I went to a friend's father's funeral a while back, and I had to admit, the service, the way the community came together was moving, and it really made me question whether I should return to the church as an adult, even with my questions of faith.

The problem is that humans evolved to be religious, and you can't just ignore that and get rid of it in a generation or two. It is in our brains and we have to live with it somehow. So from that perspective ... maybe Jesus does cure depression.

Our brains are also wired to kill for survival, rape for reproduction.

Religion is a coping mechanism for some, although its trivial to ignore. Religion is more likely than not a con-artist trick, that has lived on for centuries.

Humans most certainly did not evolve to be religious. We evolved to look for and, if necessary (to our minds), invent meanings behind things which sometimes have truly no meaning at all, i.e. the existence of existence itself. We also evolved to be fearful of the unknown, e.g. the experience of death and afterward. It seems quite simple to see how those two things resulted in our eventual invention of religion, but we did not simply evolve to be religious per se.

I'm not saying that every possible path of evolution leads to religion, only that ours did.

By that logic, you may as well say evolution led to TikTok. "Religion taps into human psychology" seems more accurate.

But what does that rephrasing change about the overall argument?

The former phrasing has a sense of inevitability to it, for one. It masks the fact that people created systems to exploit weaknesses in human psychology. Evolution led to a bias toward unsubstantiated pattern recognition and simple explanations for complex systems, not organized religion.

The inevitability (or not) is not what I wanted to focus on.

The point was that religion has become a part of our brain. How this happened (evolution, perhaps by accident), was not the important bit.

If religion has become "a part of our brain" then so has slavery, rape and the divine right of kings, for the same reasons. Yet no one argues that we just "have to learn to live with" the latter.

It isn't evolution, at least not in any genetic sense, it's simply culture. People believe religion is an immutable fact of life and the only possible source of meaning and morality when their culture teaches them as much. But there are cultures where religion matters far less than it does in, say, the US, where people get along just fine.

Except some of us consider ourselves to be quite evolved, not religious, AND absent of depression. Maybe depression (or the lack thereof) has nothing to do with religion at all.

If you're trying to establish if X is a cure for Y, then looking at people who don't have Y will not tell you much.

Anti-religion aka the religion of Scienc(TM) is still a religion.

Just because you call something a religion doesn't mean it is. There is no such thing as "religion of science"

For some people, it is. There is a segment of non-religious people who do treat the current scientific consensus as gospel and moralize adherence with typical religious in-group/out-group dynamics, despite not really understanding or engaging with any of the actual material. I disagree that relying on scientific consensus is inherently religious, though.

Tell me, of these people who supposedly practice "Science as Religion," what are their rituals? What's their scripture? Their theology? Their religious doctrines? What exactly makes this a religion rather than people simply behaving dogmatically?

You've described people who uncritically accept authority, moralize disagreement, and engage in in-group/out-group behavior. None of those characteristics is unique to religion. You can find them in politics, sports fandom, nationalism, and virtually any ideological community.

Treating scientific consensus as authoritative isn't the same as treating it as sacred or infallible. Scientific consensus is provisional, evidence-based, and subject to revision. Someone can misunderstand that process or defer to it uncritically without turning science into a religion.

You're conflating dogmatism with religiosity. They're not synonyms. Calling something a religion because some adherents behave dogmatically strips the word "religion" of any meaningful distinction.

> I found reading the New Testament brings me instant peace when my brain is in turmoil

I wonder if the Old Testament gives you the same effect

Excellent advice

oh yes! a racist, misogynist and homophobic literature book... best thing ever to get out of depression

THAT is your take away from the teachings of Jesus?

should i also mention that people who funded their religion hunted jews searching for the holy grail and were present at one if not the biggest holocaust of human history (the colonization of America, between 1500 and 1600, which killed from 25 to 100 million people)

Oh yes, those people were clearly acting out the precise instructions of Jesus as laid out in the Gospels.

Sure, it's silly to judge those highly religious people. Maybe we can judge the religion on the work of the Papacy... Though that doesn't give great results either They definitely misread "let the little children come to me"

We correctly judge communism by its results, why different standards for religion?

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