I cannot disagree with this more. I believe you to be 100% incorrect here, to the point of being literally the opposite of truth.
Of course you do, because you need the Calvinistic idea of happiness as a signifier of moral worth. It's not enough to believe in some hypothetical possibility of salvation after death, there has to be a way to know who, in this world, has been saved.
And this is why there is absolutely no relationship between your beliefs and historical Catholicism. Medieval Catholics didn't live in a world where their personal moral conduct actually mattered. Their God didn't care what you did with your genitals unless it crossed an arbitrary line into threatening some greater social or natural order. They did not expect or require each other to live some kind of perfect moral life, because they understood that such a life runs contrary to the nature of humanity. Even monasticism does not change the nature of humanity, that's why it's a sacrifice (this also accomodated the reality that a lot of people in monastic communities either didn't want to be there or were there because they had no other way to support themselves).
Then along comes Calvin and the idea of predestination, and suddenly there are two types of people in the world. There are a small group of people who behave morally, who don't drink or have extramarital sex and who live a humble, pious existence and then then there are the vast majority of humanity who are just lazy, slutty drunks. Even Calvinists, though, weren't divorced from reality enough to believe that everyone would just be happier if they stopped drinking and fucking, they knew that most people would be very miserable. The point was that
if you could live that life and not be miserable, it proved that you had a morally superior nature to everyone else, that you were predestined for salvation. But in practice, this meant a miserable existence of constant self-vigilance, it requires constant proof that not only do you not sin like everyone else but that you
don't even want to. Catholic confession is replaced with puritan repression.
And that's what you're talking about, isn't it? It's repression. People are sad because they have desires that aren't being met. Well, just pretend you don't have those desires at all. Keep telling yourself you don't actually want these things until you believe it. Delude yourself into thinking that your empty, joyless life is somehow the best life you could live. Because the important thing isn't whether you are happy, it's whether you
look happy. If you don't look happy, how will people know you are better than them?
That's what it actually means to find happiness beyond a sense of self, right? It means accepting happiness (or the outward appearance thereof) as a moral obligation you owe other people.
It's not any more convincing now than it was in the 16th and 17th centuries when the puritans got shipped off to found their own shitty country (whose powerful religious lobby would continue to be influenced by their beliefs for centuries). In fact, it's a lot less convincing because we actually know, in a material, scientific sense that humans don't work that way.
