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

Re: *ack*, no

[miz-geek.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm channeling the spouse now, not myself - I think what he's saying is that for most people (many? some?), the belief in science contains a faith that the people doing it are doing it correctly. That the scientific method really works. And he's claiming that the difference is more the standard of evidence you'll accept. And now he's saying that he has faith that eventually science *will* figure it out. And that there's really no basis for that, but he believes it just the same. (And then he started quoting George Michael and I had to stop listening :D)

Personally, I think I agree more with you - the difference in the standard of evidence is of utmost importance. Replicability and logic are key. And the fact that I *could* learn this stuff if I wanted to. Although, if I mediate and fast long enough I might have visions, so maybe that's not a good point.

Re: *ack*, no

[firecat]

The many technologies that I'm dependent on is proof that people are doing science - some kinds of science - correctly: they can replicate the result so exactly that they can crank out a zillion products based on it, which mostly work.

There are other things that are a lot harder to study scientifically, and having delved fairly deeply into research in some of these fields, I'm quite sure that most people aren't doing it correctly. Perhaps they'll eventually figure it out and perhaps not.