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]

Another thing I wanted to mention is related to a common point above: not just "why are we here?", but "why is there anything?". My impression is that the normal human instinctive explanation for anything is that it was created, made by something just as complicated.

If you look around you, you see lots of complicated stuff, and a lot of it has been created by other complicated stuff, so well, that's how the rest of it got here, too, right?

While I'm not the biggest fan of Richard Dawkins in general, I think he had a valid point when he said that the theory of evolution was the first remotely plausible alternative to "god created everything". And it's not easy to understand, there seems to be nothing intuitive to plug it in to.

It's possible that you regard this as a negative or insulting explanation for faith; I don't think it's any more so than the fact that we can't synthesise vitamin C, the way most other species can.

I also think there's an important component to religion which is consistently devalued and demeaned in the discussions I read and participate in, in the Western world, and that is community. I really think we've pushed individualism too far when it's okay to make fun of people for wanting to be part of a community, to share something with other humans. Good religion[1] is often about fast, effective ways of creating community.

[1] In the sense of successful/popular: after all, you were interested in why people would want to invest in it.