By Hilary
White
LONDON,
March 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Another study has found that sincere and
active religious belief makes people happy, the Daily Mail reports.
Statistical
analysis has shown repeatedly that church attendance, family life and stable
marriages are the building blocks of a happy life.
Prof.
Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics, and Dr. Orsolya Lelkes of the
European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research presented their research
at the conference of the Royal Economic Society in Coventry. They said that
religious believers are happier overall than atheists or agnostics. More than
this, regular church attendance and an active prayer life make people even
happier than passive belief alone.
Data
gleaned from thousands of Europeans and British people say that religion can
help people cope with life's disappointments and difficulties including the
most stressful, such as the death of loved ones, divorce and unemployment. Religious
believers have higher levels of satisfaction and suffer less psychological
damage from life's troubles.
Meanwhile,
church attendance in Britain and elsewhere continues its decades-long decline. Recent
figures show a 500,000 fall in typical Sunday attendance in Britain since the
last comparable research in 1998. Although these numbers can be seen most
clearly in attendance at the Church of England and despite what is being called
the "anomalous" and probably temporary rise in attendance at Catholic
churches caused by an influx of eastern European immigrants to the UK, Catholic
church attendance has also plummeted since the high point of the early
1960's.
But the
numbers of people who believe is falling even faster than attendance at weekly
church services. People who identified themselves as members of the official
state religion have dropped by 40 per cent since 1983. A 2005 study said that
only 50 per cent of children are likely to retain the religious faith of their
upbringing. The report suggested that the decline in religious belief through
the generations is already too far gone for any reversal.
The author
one study, Dr. David Voas, said the loss of faith in Britain "is not
temporary or accidental, it is a generational phenomenon - the decline has
continued year on year. The fact that children are only half as likely to
believe as their parents indicates that, as a society, we are at an advanced
stage of secularisation." In 2000, a survey found that half of all adults
in the UK say they have no religious affiliation, a 13 percent increase from
1983.