Hoops wrote:If it was found that Christians were truly happier people than everyone else, I think people would change their religion and become Christian to partake in the happiness they were missing out on.
Well, again, it's my understanding that joy and happiness are different things. It is Christian joy that we are "selling", not happiness. And for anyone to say otherwise, in my opinion, is not doing justice to the human condition. I'm NOT saying that we can not have happiness. Not at all. But happiness, it seems to me, is dependent on many factors, some of which we control and some we don't. To be sure, how we deal with uncontrollable factors and the mistakes we all make has an effect on our happiness. But happiness, in my opinion, is too wispy to be a good barometer of anything. Let alone one's eternal destiny.
Let me go back to my original statement about joy.
Here is my thought process:
The human is able to experience feelings he/she associates with the word joy.
You can experience these feelings from certain conditions.
These start to accumulate over a lifetime, some you recall better than others after the fact.
The accumulation of these experiences and memories might have some value.
If one religion had the ability to give people a greater accumulation, and people knew about this, they would all go join that religion.
Maybe.... That is my best shot but it is open for debate.