Explaining Religious Belief, Part Two

[Note: I am mostly finished with job applications and my dissertation, so I am going to pick up a blog series that I started some time ago.]

Here is the general topic:

[If someone is an atheist, then he or she owes us an explanation about why nearly everyone who has ever lived has held to some kind of religious belief. There are, of course, several such attempts (five, as I count them) that I will review one by one over the next several weeks.]

Perhaps the most common way to explain religious belief is as a quest for psychological comfort. After all, it is common to hear people saying that their faith has helped them through hard times, or parents telling their children about heavenly bliss when they confront the death of a loved one or a pet. The mere existence of those Precious Moments dolls in a child’s room seems to emphasize this. Undoubtedly, then, there are many people who are religious believers today because religion makes them feel good.

There are continual cultural references to this idea, but the most sustained critique I can think of comes from The Invention of Lying. In that movie, Ricky Gervais’ character is the only member of the human race who has the capacity to lie. And, since everyone else only tells the truth all of the time (they don’t know any different), they believe everything that Gervais says. In an effort to comfort his dying mother during her last moments, he describes her after-life in heaven. He intends this as a white lie to make her last few moments bearable, but others overhear his story and ask him to describe this ‘heaven’ in more detail. So, he is forced to give a systematic account of the after-life, which he has made up entirely. And since no one is aware that he is lying, his story about heaven becomes dogma.

This is obviously meant as a reconstruction of the process of inventing religion; 1) some guys just made it up in an effort to comfort the masses, 2) it got written down, and 3) it came to be considered the word of God.

What is undoubtedly true is that some – perhaps many or most – religious people have accepted much religious dogma because it makes them feel good. But whether this explains the religious belief of some people is not the question I want to ask. I am asking a deeper question, namely, “Why is there religious belief at all?”

It seems to me unbelievable that religion was merely invented in order to make people feel good about their afterlife prospects. I say this because many religious people (pantheists) do not even believe that your personal identity survives death. The rest, the monotheists, rely on books that are absolutely unsettling. How do you read Revelation and feel comforted? Pick a passage from the Jewish Scriptures and read it – feel good yet? My point is that if the Bible were written in order to offer people comfort, the authors did a very, very, poor job. If I were in Gervais’ position and got to completely make up a religion for the sake of comfort, the religion that I would make up would have nothing but love, angels, smiles, and hugs. That is not even close to what we find in the Bible.