Happiness is an important factor in human life. It is what human beings seek. It is identified with pleasure, with the absence of pain, and it contrasts with sadness, anguish, grief, and similar "negative" emotions. Happiness has different meanings according to different religious beliefs and in different cultures around the world. In some religions, happiness is defined as an acceptance of religious doctrine and a subsequent unity with God or some other deity. In some religions it is a matter of achieving a sense of community, and in others it may be a personal matter, something enjoyed by the individual once he or she achieves a certain level of understanding and acceptance. These differing conceptions can be discerned in a comparison of several religious communities on the subject of happiness, and these communities will be Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Judaism.
Religion generally involves an attempt to achieve some degree of enlightenment, an achievement of a certain knowledge of the holy and of the acceptance of that knowledge into one's life. Religion is a life-transforming concept, a body of doctrine and knowledge that guides the individual to select what is right in behavior and to shun what is considered wrong. Doing so brings the individual a level of happiness, or religious joy, or whatever specific term may be used to indicate that the individual has achieved this understanding and has received a flood of good feelings from the act. One of the first purposes of religion is to achieve a sense of peace, a precursor to happiness:
Man's basic problem is his need to find a way to life in constructive peace in the face of forces which tend to thrust him into destructive conflict. There is nothing new in this. Centuries ago some of the wisest of men faced the problem and set forth a method for its solution: a way of life based upon social idealism which must begin with the most intimate relations bet...