Are religious believers more depressed than atheists?

It could be a chicken-and egg problem. It's hard to make much of the causal factors because other studies provide conflicting evidence, and it seems in some cases that there are confounding factors at work (for instance, one study linked low depression risk with the participants' satisfaction with their close relationships). It certainly doesn't look like religion itself is the main factor so much as things like social involvement and personal optimism, which makes it all the more interesting that now we have a study showing the opposite effect.

Examples of other studies with different results than the OP's can be found below, but otherwise just skip to the last two for a study that looks for other factors and for a review of the literature as a whole: 

• Religious attendance, spirituality, and major depression in Canada: a 14-year follow-up study.
• Religiosity and major depression in adults at high risk: a ten-year prospective study.
• Longitudinal associations of importance of religion and frequency of service attendance with depression risk among adolescents in Nova Scotia.
• The association between spiritual and religious involvement and depressive symptoms in a Canadian population.
• Religious involvement and risk of major depression in a prospective nationwide study of African American adults.
• Religiosity and resilience in persons at high risk for major depression.
• Family religion and psychopathology in children of depressed mothers: ten-year follow-up.
• Protective associations of importance of religion and frequency of service attendance with depression risk, suicidal behaviours and substance use in adolescents in Nova Scotia, Canada.
• Religion, spirituality, and health in medically ill hospitalized older patients.

Most interesting are the last two, and I'll add quotations from them to indicate the most interesting stuff. The first one points out that it's not so much spirituality itself as factors like social support and general optimism that matter, and spirituality simply works through those factors. The second one points out that, while there is a difference, it's not a strong one, and the literature in general is not the tightest.

The relationship between spirituality and depressive symptoms: testing psychosocial mechanisms.

Although many studies suggest lower rates of depressive symptoms in those who report greater spirituality, few have investigated the mechanisms by which spirituality might relate to depressive symptoms... Spirituality was indirectly related to depressive symptoms. More specifically, spirituality was significantly associated with optimism and volunteering but not with social support, and optimism, volunteering and perceived social support were significantly associated with depressive symptoms. The link between spirituality and depressive symptoms is indirect. The relationship is mediated by optimism, volunteering, and social support. Findings present research and practice implications.

Religion and depression: a review of the literature.

We reviewed data from approximately 80 published and unpublished studies that examined the association of religious affiliation or involvement with depressive symptoms or depressive disorder... Although these associations tend to be consistent, they are modest and are substantially reduced in multivariate research. Longitudinal research is sparse, but suggests that some forms of religious involvement might exert a protective effect against the incidence and persistence of depressive symptoms or disorders. The existing research is sufficient to encourage further investigation of the associations of religion with depressive symptoms and disorder. Religion should be measured with higher methodological standards than those that have been accepted in survey research to date.

The original study can be found here:

Spiritual and religious beliefs as risk factors for the onset of major depression: an international cohort study

Source: Religious believers more depressed than atheists: study

Holy Wars

http://rachelheldevans.com/win-culture-war-lose-generation-amendment-one-north-carolina

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

http://times-journal.com/news/article_7759d0f0-9f9f-11e1-8abb-001a4bcf887a.html

Moore was removed from office as a Supreme Court chief justice in 2003 for his refusal to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Judicial Building despite orders to do so from a federal judge.

Income Inequality Correlates With Religiosity

The United States has the highest economic disparity in the Western world. It is also the most religious - about twice as religious as the U.K. This paper argues that economic inequality is a large contributor to the degree of religiosity in the U.S.

        There is strong support for the idea that America’s large income gap may be the cause of its exceptionally high religiosity. Although the United States and the United Kingdom are both among the most unequal countries, the United States has a considerably higher level of income inequality than the United Kingdom, as measured by comparing the incomes of the richest and the poorest 20 percent in each country (Pickett 2011; 17). This fact may play a role in the explanatory framework of the extent of America’s religiosity when compared to that of the U.K. Research on religion and inequality has found strong correlation between high levels of inequality and high religiosity. According to the Evolutionary Psychology journal’s article, The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions, “high levels of income disparity, popular religiosity as measured by differing levels of belief and activity, and rejection of evolutionary science correlate strongly negatively with improving conditions” (Paul 2007; 398). Graph 1.0 and Graph 1.1 demonstrate the relationship between Gini-coefficient income inequality and popular religiosity versus secularism scale.

Graph 1.0 Income inequality in rich countries is related to religiosity.

Graph 1.0 Key: Each country is represented by the bold letter in each country’s name. 

The United States is represented by the letter “U” and England by the letter “E”.

Full paper: Why Is The United States More Religious Than The United Kingdom?

How to Talk About Religion

The rule is “don’t talk about Religion, money, or politics at the dinner table.” Why? These discussions become really heated and the atmosphere becomes tense. So I will talk here about how to talk about these issues without the consequences.

You have to know the purpose of your “talk”. You can either “discuss” or “argue”. You should argue only if the person is willing—and wanting—to change his mind. So, for example, you would not argue with a fundamentalist Christian—you would not change their mind. “like giving medicine to the dead”.

The key is finding whether you want to discuss or argue. Discussing means you share your opinions with the goal of learning the other person’s point of view. The goal here is not to have your worldview validated, but to learn something. Here, watch out for the trap of turning it into an argument by countering their opinion with which you disagree. So the only response to the other person’s beliefs should be a question clarifying their view (not a challenge). I will argue that discussion also serves the purpose of persuasion without heightening the tension. To argue means to counteract the other person’s statements, or to attack. This includes playing the devil’s advocate.

It is easy to fall into the trap of turning a discussion into an argument, so you have to always be aware of your purpose and keep it in mind with every statement you make. Being more knowledgeable about religion puts you into the position of power, so it is easy to slip into the trap of gaining control of the discussion and countering every statement the other person makes—which builds tension. It’s like ego masturbation, so you’ve got to cut off the discussion, possibly by bringing awareness to what you are doing (arguing). “Hey, I just realized that this is an argument, but I just wanted to discuss the topic”. This statement can serve as a natural transition to talking about the difficulty of keeping the boundary between the two.

You should never argue, even if your goal is to persuade the person. Arguing with your friends is never a good idea. Argument is an attack on the person (I’m doubting if there is ever a reason to argue with friends), which, even if you win, hurt their self-esteem. And you don’t want o hurt your friend’s self-esteem, so if you win the argument, you both loose. The guiding principle should be love, and you should never attack. People are not computers that respond to evidence. People are emotional beings and do not respond to reason. Persuasion should take the form of simply stating your belief, and not arguing about it. So the most effective method to persuade somebody is to simply state your belief—even if they do agree, they have heard you and it will weight in with the other factors on which their belief depends (such as the benefits that come with believing in it). You’ve got to be humble and accept that most of the time—in fact never (how many times have you won an argument?, none, because of self-serving bias)—you will not immediately change somebody’s belief (because of other factors that the person takes into account). To believe you alone should be enough to change somebody’s belief is presumptuous, arrogant, and naïve. Once each of you took a turn stating your beliefs, you should stop and move on to another topic (such as why it is so hard to talk about religion).

You should discuss

In a discussion, you should never tell the person that they are wrong. Say, “I believe that… because of…” And if you find that they are defending themselves, and you are going back and forth, you are arguing, and so you should stop immediately.

The very existence of atheists is an attack on religion. Religion holds a certain worldview (God exists) as true, and atheists deny it (God does not exist). Saying that there is no god to a religious person is like saying that his wife is ugly.

Teapot in the Sky

This is the origin of the blog title. Russell’s argument in an article titled “Is There a God?” in 1952:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

In 1958 Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism:

I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely. 

Why Do People Choose Religious?

"All thinking men are atheists."

- Ernest Hemingway

Are Religious People Stupid? In short, no. There are religious people who are some of the most intelligent people on the planet, e.g., Francis Collins, author of The Language of God. However, intelligent people don't always use their intelligence, and their belief is often influenced by psychosocial factors. For example, I once was misled into attending a pyramid-scheme business called AmWay (formerly Quixtar). After realizing that this was a scam, to my surprise I saw a UC Berkeley graduate there. She wasn't there because she is not intelligent, but because she is human. She is susceptible to the same needs and wants as every other human. However, simply being intelligent is different from using that intelligence to reach sound conclusions. Therefore, she wasn't thinking with her head, and can you blame her?

Is Atheism a Religion?

To show their contempt for Atheists, who challenge the religious folks’ strong-held beliefs, Christians dismissively call atheism "a mere religion". Let’s think about this for a second... People who identify themselves as religious despise another group of people who, as they claim, are also religious? This seems oxymoronic (on the second thought, maybe not, considering how Christians view Islam, for example). Maybe it satisfies them to think that since they don’t know what they are talking about, those who challenge them also don’t know what they are talking about. Or, more likely, it is that they think that their religion is the only true religion and that all other religions are wrong, and therefore by calling atheism a religion they can dismiss it like they do all other religions. So it is clear that calling atheism a religion categorizes it with all the other religions, but what is so threatening to them to accept atheism as being not a religion? So what does it mean to call atheism a religion, or, in other words, why is it so important for religious people to believe that atheism is a religion? Maybe accepting atheism as not being a religion puts it completely outside of the realm of faith, making it require an explanation, poses a challenge for them to disprove it, since, if it is not a religion, then it must be grounded in reason. Reason is hard to refute, and religious people just can not tolerate with any sound view that challenges their beliefs. Or maybe it’s merely because atheists are a minority, and as is the case with all minorities, they are discriminated against. But whatever the reason is for atheism to be called a religion, it is necessary to refute this fallacious belief. Let me tell you why atheism is not a religion. It is because religion, in its most liberal sense, involves the belief in supernatural power. Atheism, quite simply, lacks this belief. But furthermore, religion also includes a set of beliefs about the creation, nature, purpose, and the end of the universe, as well as beliefs about morality, the meaning of our existence, and what will happen to us when we die. In contrast to these set of beliefs, although some atheists have adopted secular philosophies, such as Secular Humanism or Buddhism, there is no one ideology or set of behaviors to which all, or even most atheists adhere.

It is absurd to call atheism a religion just as it is absurd to call “bald” a hair color and a-unicornism (the lack of a belief in unicorns) a religion. In logic you don’t have to prove the negative, that is, prove the non-existence of something for which there is no evidence, such as god, or even unicorns. Nobody would say, “you can’t prove that unicorns exist, therefore they exist”, much less saying that not believing in unicorns—and, more strongly, even believing that there are no unicorns—makes it a religion. That is absurd in the same way as calling atheism a religion is absurd. But the point here being that the burden of proof is on those who claim that something is true, such as the claim that god exists, and not on those who claim the opposite (god does not exist), because there is simply no evidence to support that claim.

Some claim that not only do atheists simply lack the belief in god, but they also hold the belief that there is no god (there is a difference) so strongly that this (dis)belief makes atheism a religion. Others believe that the belief in god is so obvious, that one needs a religion, or faith, to believe otherwise. This, of course is a delusional viewpoint, since it is the belief in god that requires faith, not the absence of the belief. “They believe in the absence of god just as we believe in the presence of god,” they say (without paying attention to the reason that logic doesn’t require you to prove a negative). However, although it may be the case with some who claim to be atheists, I have yet to meet a self-proclaimed atheist who believes that there is no god with the same fervor and certainty as a self-proclaimed religious person believes that there is god. In other words, the vast majority of atheists do not assert that there is a 100 percent chance that there is no god, maybe 99.99 percent chance, but not 100. Anybody who believes in anything 100 percent is wrong. Atheists do not, and this, you might say, technically makes them agnostics.

In conclusion, Christians think atheism is a religion because atheists are sometimes as steadfast as religious people about holding on to their belief, and sometimes atheists are not open to other opinions. This only proves that religious people are either too stupid to understand atheists’ argument or even reason in general, or they are simply too arrogant to pay attention to it, and so they only focus on the atheists’ unwillingness to see their point of view. So to a Christian anyone who disagrees with them zealously—doesn't matter the reason—is religious. Problem solved. Bam!

So what reasons do people give for calling atheism a religion? They say it is similar to religion. It is clear to see that this is a straw man argument. Instead of actually addressing what religion means, they bend its definition to something much more general and then compare atheism to that general definition, which is far from what the word “religion” actually means. They don’t acknowledge that there is actually no clearly defined philosophy, or set of beliefs, common to all or even most atheists.

A slightly different yet no less important topic: why is religion so widely accepted, despite the lack of empirical evidence? To the question of why so many people seem to need a god, Stephen Hawking, the greatest scientific mind of our time, replied, "People want to think there is something they can relate to and which can make them feel they are not isolated but are part of a larger whole." Religion emerges from the need to belong. It is perpetuated by receiving confirmation from other believers as well as by confirmation bias, a very common error in thinking that occurs when we selectively notice or focus upon evidence which tends to support the things we already believe or want to be true while ignoring that evidence which goes against those beliefs or ideas. It is a defense mechanism wired into us to protect our self esteem. An extreme version of confirmation bias is when someone denies having any flaws. In addition, confirmation bias is especially liberally applied by religious people because religious belief does not require empirical evidence. As Mark Twain put it, "if it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary." They are not aware that personal revelation is not acceptable evidence to prove a fact. Thus, religious people use selective evidence to confirm their beliefs. For example, using only stories of people who were "saved" because they turned to god after being addicted to drugs as evidence of the existence of god is using a selective sample of all people who ever did drugs, because there are those who turned to god and did not get better and others who quit using drugs and are leading a happy life without turning to god. This is not even to mention the false assumption of a causal relationship between turning to god and being "saved".

As for me, all thinking men are atheists (but not all atheists are thinking men). I view the belief in god as the belief in all other superstitious entities, such as unicorns, Santa Clause, and the flying spaghetti monster—they are very likely to be false, impossible to disprove, and delusional to believe in.