Perhaps it is not the belief in God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world—Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands—are hardly religious at all? The citizens of these countries, though, clearly believe in something. They believe in six weeks of vacation, in human rights, in democracy, in lazy afternoons spent sitting in cafés, in wearing socks and sandals at the same time. Beliefs we may admire or, in the case of the sock-and-sandal combo, find utterly abhorrent. But they are beliefs nonetheless.
