By Rojina Kandel
According to Wikipedia, religion is a range of socio-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements – although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith and supernatural being or beings. There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, though nearly all of them have regionally based, relatively small followings. Four religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity – account for over 77% of the world’s population, 92% of the world either follows one of those four religions or identifies as non-religious, meaning that the remaining 9,000+ faiths account for only 8% of the population combined.
People who believe in religion even though they are either Hindu or Buddhist, or Christian, or Islam, follow various religious activities and religious practices according to their own religion. Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.
It has been said and also seen practically also that in comparison to men, women seem to be more religious in most of the religions. This fact can be judged by simply observing at temples, churches, gumbas, masjids or any other religious/holy place; that in those religious places, most of the time number of women devotees is more than that of men. This may be because women have more faith in God than men; as in houses also women perform religious rituals like worshipping Deities on an everyday basis and pujas (occasions of worshipping Gods) are also conducted mainly by women in their homes.
Apart from encouraging social connection, religion can help people cultivate positive emotions that are good for our mental and physical well-being, such as gratitude. Many studies have often credited religion with making women healthier, happier and more engaged in their communities. An Oxford University Press book summarizing the research on the subject, for example, comes in at almost 900 pages. In the analysis in this “Handbook of Religion and Health” they reviewed 326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of “religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction”, finding that79% of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1% reported that they were less happy (the rest found no or mixed findings). The finding of the relationship between happiness and religiosity is so established that many research papers take it as a given starting point. For example, a recent paper published in one of the most prestigious social science journals states that it is a “well-known research finding…that, in general, the religious are happier than the non-religious.” ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness), The Hare Krishna Movement initiated by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupad, states that studying religious books like Bhagavad Gita teaches us the art of living cause the Bhagavad Gita is the song of God and the manual of our life which has all the solution of our problems.
Psychiatrist Harold Koenig of Duke University says, “Religion is not going to affect happiness supernaturally. It has to happen through psychological, sociological and biological mechanisms.” Hence, it can be said that being religious; believing in God and communicating with the higher power that is watching over us, suggests that being religious not only makes women happy but also maintains well-being in multiple domains of life.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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