A couple of months ago, I happened to ask a friend who had emigrated from Sweden if she was religious. “No!” she exclaimed. “Almost no one in Sweden is religious.”
As we see at left, there seems to be a huge correlation between atheism and the national level of happiness. But what causes that?
Are believers unhappy people for some reason? That doesn’t make sense.
Here’s my two-fold theory. Atheists believe:
a) That we only live once, so we try to enjoy it while we can.
And, more importantly,
b) That we need to take care of one another (since there is no God). We’re willing to make sacrifices if that means things like great education, universal healthcare, environmental responsibility, tolerable working conditions, and near-zero poverty.
Six months ago, our local CVS drugstore had a manager, a handful of employees answering customers’ questions, checking them out at the cash register, stocking shelves, etc.
Last month, I noticed that most of these employees were gone, and the former manager was now stocking shelves. I also noted long lines of customers waiting for an automated checkout machine to become available.
Last week, I saw the former manager working at a nearby grocery store.
Also, the pharmacy is now closed for an hour for lunch. When I asked about this, I was asked, “Don’t you think we employees deserve to eat lunch?” I responded, “Of course I do. But can’t CVS afford to staff the pharmacy so customers are not inconvenienced?”
This is certainly not a unique–or even rare–occurrence; it seem that CVS is like most large corporations, driven by cost-cutting, while abusing their employees and their customers.
Barack Obama read the actual GOP agenda to a roaring Atlanta crowd Wednesday: a $1 trillion tax cut for millionaires and billionaires, paid for with higher health care costs and Medicaid cuts. Plus a war in Iran that everyone warned would push prices up. “(Democrats will) ban hamburgers and make everybody eat tofu,” he joked.
The meme here makes sense–until you realize that the most productive, happiest people on Earth live in Scandinavia and the other social democracies scattered around the globe.
Providing everyone with the opportunity to succeed seems to work quite well in the real world.
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