thoughts on religious/spiritual belief

[firecat]

This was originally posted as a comment in vito_excalibur's journal here; it's slightly expanded here.

Whether or not deity exists, it seems clear that a lot of people have a lot invested in deity's existing (believing or hoping or acting-as-if or...). I'm probably just not looking in the right places, but sometimes I wonder why more attention isn't paid to why so many people invest so much in it. Most of the speculations about that I hear are insults or dismissals from people who don't have the investment and who think that having the investment means you're deluded. That may be so, I suppose, but I also think that throwing away some pretty amazing (and yes, also some pretty horrible) human accomplishments as entirely based on delusion is depressing and reductionistic - kind of like saying oh, thoughts and feelings are nothing but electrical signals in the brain. Yes they are, but they aren't "nothing but."

Can you think of any neutral-to-positive and non-insulting reasons that many humans have a lot invested in believing in the existence of deity? What do we get out of it; why do some of us need or strongly want it?

(Disclosure - I need/strongly want spiritual experience and have had spiritual experiences [that could also be explained in non-supernatural ways, but I choose to experience/remember them as spiritual]. I neither believe nor don't believe in the existence of deity. I usually boil this down to "I believe in deity on alternative thursdays.")

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'm an atheist, in one sense. I don't think any deities exist outside ourselves, because there isn't anywhere for them to be, if that makes any sense. (It's a biological/complexity argument: everything ultimately is matter, and the matter has to be complicated to give rise to complex higher-order effects, and our brain is about the most complicated matter we can find.)

On the other hand, I don't agree that that means deities don't exist, full stop. I think it's much too simplistic a definition of "exist". My preference for chocolate ice cream doesn't exist according to those criteria, either. Nor does the speed limit. In other words, matter might be fundamental, but it's only fundamental, and lots of complex things exist at higher levels of abstraction, particularly within and between people.

I also think that at that level of abstraction, things can exist to different extents. For example, the law against murder exists more than the law against building anything within 10m of the Brisbane River. And Hamlet exists more than [your favourite example of badly-written fictional character]. And on that kind of scale, deities seem overall to be at the 'exists lots' end of the scale - you see evidence of that all around you, even if you're an atheist like me.

I don't think I've answered your question, but hopefully I've pointed in the direction my thinking goes. And certainly when I talk to people who are theists/deists, I respect their beliefs. This has been more about how I think about it from my viewpoint.