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

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I believe that the earliest uses of religion were (1) attempts to explain random occurrences such as weather, illness, accidents, and natural catastrophes, and (2) attempts to convince ourselves that death was not the end of consciousness. I also believe that those two reasons are still the strongest draws religion offers. IME if you talk to someone who is very religious (and it doesn't seem to make any difference what religion -- I've had the same conversations with people of widely varying faiths) about why their religion matters to them, sooner or later it comes down to one of those two things.