CNN recently reported that according to a new study: Christians tweet from the heart, atheists from the head. When they are limited to 140 characters or less, these researchers say, Christians are happier than atheists.
The study conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tapped Twitter as a research tool and compared the messages of Christians and atheists. Two doctoral students in social psychology and an adviser analyzed the casual language of nearly 2 million tweets from more than 16,000 active users to come up with their findings, which were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
The team identified subjects by finding Twitter users who followed the feeds of five prominent public figures. In the case of Christians, those select five were Pope Benedict XVI, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, conservative political commentator Dinesh D’Souza and Joyce Meyer, an evangelical author and speaker.
In the case of atheists, the five followed feeds included Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Monica Salcedo and Michael Shermer.
With the help of a text analysis program, the researchers found that Christians tweet with higher frequency words reflecting positive emotions, social relationships and an intuitive style of thinking – the sort that’s gut-driven. Christians are more likely to use words like “love,” “happy” and “great”; “family,” “friend” and “team.”
Atheists use words like “bad,” “wrong,” and “awful” or “think,” “reason” and “question,” said Ryan Ritter, one of the students behind the study.
Now why is that?
I guess because Christians have the following reasons to be happy :
- Forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38)
- An abundant life of purpose (John 10:10; Ecclesiastes 12:13)
- Divine help in prayers (Romans 8:26)
- Divine help in resisting temptation (1 Corinthians 15:57)
- Help from angels while living life (Hebrews 1:14; Daniel 10:2, 12-13)
- Divine protection from evil (2 Thessalonians 3:3)
- Jesus serves as their “defense attorney” (1 John 2:1)
- The Holy Spirit becomes their helper (John 14:16; 16:7)
- God ensures that their physical necessities will be met (Matthew 6:33; Mark 10:29-30)
- Divine help in living the righteous life (Romans 8:11)
- Divine help bearing the burdens of life (Matthew 11:28-30; Isaiah 42:3)
- A heavenly inheritance reserved for you (Ephesians 1:11; 1 Peter 1:4)
- An indescribable inner peace (Philippians 4:7)
- Trusting in grace instead of their own ability (Titus 3:5)
- The ever-abiding presence of God with them (Matthew 28:20; Revelation 3:10)
- Abounding love toward others (1 Thessalonians 3:12-13)
Christians got it made 🙂
