Religious Ideas and Psychological Well-Being:A Critical View

Religious ideas and ritual life are considered important pursuits for everyone. We cannot imagine how humans can express emotions without being convinced with their real world. This world makes them have feelings of security, satisfaction, subjective well-being and other positive feelings resulting in happiness. Moreover, humans cannot stand their life without having in a doctrine or performing dogmatic activities. The sacred is a structure in human consciousness not a stage the history of this consciousness. This is because food and sex are life related secrets. We can say that to live as a human being means to be religious. (Eilade, 1986-1987, translated) The current research aims to show the effect of the relationship between religious ideas and dogmatic (doctrine) activities performance on individuals' psychological wellbeing as religious individuals are found to be happier than non religious (Basha & Abd El-Satar, 2015) participating in dogmatic or religious activities help individuals to have a meaning for life, a hope in the future, self esteem and others' acceptance. Thus individuals are able to feel happy and satisfied with life, so they become able to confront psychological stressors.