Thursday, March 3, 2016

The Great Pumpkin

I was perusing The Book of Faces today when I happened upon this post:


Aside from the fact that someone decided to hijack "Peanuts" to make a religious post, I take issue with the message within it. Now I agree that worrying about any-and-everything is no way to live life and that some issues/situations/people just need to be let go. But no all-powerful entity is just going to snap their fingers and do things for you. 

I do know that oftentimes religious beliefs can serve as a buffer to anxiety. Research suggests that attending church and believing in some sort of afterlife are two variables which are negatively correlated with anxiety (meaning that as the frequency of the two variables increases, anxiety decreases). However, strong beliefs in "the pervasiveness of sin" are positively associated with anxiety, meaning that as these beliefs become more frequent, anxiety increases.

Anxiety is not always a bad thing to have, though. The only known law in psychology, known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law, states that there is a "perfect" level of anxiety (or physiological arousal) for an individual to perform at their best on a task. Too little and performance is lowered; too much and performance is lowered again. So attending church and holding beliefs about an afterlife are probably not bad things to do in terms of anxiety (though I would argue that afterlife beliefs help decrease anxiety about the unknown, rather than simply being at peace with the fact that one cannot know the answer to what happens after death), but "giving all of one's problems to God" will probably not help with whatever situation one may be dealing with--there needs to be some anxiety/physiological arousal for one to perform their best in a situation.

Also, Charles Schulz was a secular humanist. 

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