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.")

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From:

05-silvermaple.livejournal.com

From my experiences in Free Methodism, Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Goddess-centered Paganism, and the local Humanist group, I'd say that the main reason people go for religion is that community is available there, and that our society is very hard on people who don't have the support of a community.

I think that many of the benefits claimed for religious belief actually accrue to the believers from the fact that they are in community, rather than from the specific beliefs. Living in a culture that treats humans as a commodity (whether as the commodity "labor" or the commodity "consumer") leaves us all with a hunger for an identity that is more than "something with a price tag".

Community gives us mutual aid and comfort in times of birth, sickness, old age, and death. It gives us people like ourselves to hang out with for primate purposes of mutual grooming and whoopie. It gives us somebody to share food, music, dancing, and shelter with, especially if there is an ashram or monastery or retreat center to share. We are meant to huddle together in the dark and keep each other warm, and community furthers.

But too many people have been forced by job or work to move away from communities they were born to, or that they worked to build, and to start all over again in new places. So the Big Old (or new) Rich religions are the most successful ones. They have lots of branches, where new people can fit in right away. If there had ever been such a thing as a chain of Freethinkers' Mutual Aid Societies, I doubt very much whether I would ever have joined any religions or cults.