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  • Because belief is intrinsic to humanity even if we don't believe in religion.

    I believe in a lot of human concepts, including kindness, altruism, democracy and humanism. They are all still effectively made up human ideas.

    I also believe when I sit down that the chair below me really exists but I cannot truly trust my own senses 100% either. So effectively I "believe" what my sensory organs and brain interpretation tell me, but the reality is the brain and its interpretations can be wrong.

    Look at the USA, the founders of the nation are often treated with a reverence akin to that of religious figures.

    People have all kinds of delusions. People worship all kinds of weird things. Religion is just one of many.

    Finally, someone like Ayn Rand shows that a human can have pretty reprehensible and hypocritical beliefs even if they are an atheist. She promoted bullshit "great men" theories of humanity and argued that selfishness could be used for good.

    She also died penniless and on government benefits while spending her whole life preaching against things like government benefits.

    People are deeply irrational even without religion.

  • Like it or not, people who went to prayer house or religious gatherings socialise more than people who stay indoor and only interact with limited amount of people. Assuming there's no fishy business going on with that particular chapter, they tend to be happier considering the fact human are social animal and the feeling of loneliness due to lack of human to human interaction is the build-in alarm system to warn us against solitude. It's this reason religion is so success because it's enforce togetherness and make you feels like you're part of something.

    If we're going into a utopian world where human doesn't need to work anymore and social security is guaranteed, religious will be something even bigger than today.

    Edit: forgot to mentioned, am atheist and give no shit to skyman, but somehow on the internet atheist can't have opinion that's not shitting on people with faith.

    • Nah, I like my community without the side of eternal suffering that so many religions like to threaten you with for varioua reasons.

      I'd put my money on huge adoption of D&D in the utopian future before I put it on religion.

      • I too don't like my community centered around religion, but everywhere i look, religion tend to be the biggest community gathering around the world.

    • Like it or not, people who went to prayer house or religious gatherings socialise more than people who stay indoor and only interact with limited amount of people.

      While this statement is true, its also true even if you're not religious. I was not raised religious at all but always got together with family/cousins/friends nearly every weekend.

      ... they tend to be happier considering the fact human are social animal and the feeling of loneliness due to lack of human to human interaction is the build-in alarm system to warn us against solitude. It’s this reason religion is so success because it’s enforce togetherness and make you feels like you’re part of something.

      Kinda. This study [0] of 3,942 19-year-old in Sweden put it best:

      ... religion and religiousness per se have little impact on happiness. In particular, we find that social networks tend to be positively associated with happiness, and that this effect is driven by co-organizational membership among friends.

      So while religious upbringing can force people to socialize, that doesn't mean the lack of religiosity will have a negative impact as the lack of religion does not dictate that you will not congregate/gather with peers/friends/family and feel the same level of "belonging" to a group - even if its not a well defined group.

      If we’re going into a utopian world where human doesn’t need to work anymore and social security is guaranteed, religious will be something even bigger than today.

      I'd say this claim is unfounded. Why must we turn to religion? There are clubs, groups, meetups, friends, events and niches of never ending categories that easily fulfill the need of "belonging" to a group - it's actually one thing humans are really good at - forming "in" and "out" groups.

      Source: [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275143707_Faith_or_Social_Foci_Happiness_Religion_and_Social_Networks_in_Sweden

      • Yes, i do agree on all the thing you said, what i'm saying is it's not mutually exclusive. Religious people can and will go to religious meetup and all the other non-religious gathering too. I know that because i have some friend that do both. It's not the case of black and white, this or that, do and don't.

        The issue i have with OP's question and a lot of atheist is they tend to put religious people as a one dimension entity and think highly of themselves because they "aren't like that", that irrationality is what they accuse religious people have. It's that sort of tribalism that cause a lot of conflict, and i fear tribalism more than i fear religion.

    • We don't need religion, we did at one time. When we didn't know why or how people got sick, why sometimes crops would be plentiful and other times famine or why the ground shook sometimes or even just figuring out morals

      But we know those things now and when we encounter something we don't we have the knowledge and tools to figure out what's up.

      We don't need churches for a common social place, we have parks, libraries, community centers and community wide events to invest in. We can socialize and learn other cultures around the world in an instant. We don't just have random villages and tiny cities any more, we have large and diverse cities so we everyone can have a little of everything they're interested in.

      At this point, all religion does is serve as yet another thing to divide us.

    • Based on what evidence lmao

      Classic.

  • I, for real, want to know if there are any religious/spiritual people here commenting because yikes. I think a lot of people also interpreted your question to be about organized religion, and specifically christianity of the US variety. Please seek out other religious thoughts - I've found much Jewish thought on religion to be of interest. For myself, I'm not christian and not Jewish.

    I'm religious because growing up, I adopted the values of the religion I was taught - values of kindness, openness, and inclusion. It's as core a part of my being as my ways of cooking or socializing. To not be religious would feel like hiding parts of myself.

    The routine of following the practices, as well as religion/spirituality being able to help us face the unknown we still have in our lives. It can provide internal strength and belief in our ability. I also find the routine a way to connect to my family, my culture, and to my day-to-day. My religious time is more a time of internal reflection on my own actions and if they align with my values. Do folks without a routine religious/spiritual practice do the same?

    The community aspect some touched on is huge. I read a book, Palaces for the People, where it mentioned that those with strong social connections fare better in times of crisis. While there are institutions that are getting to the same influence of religious institutions, they are still far less impactful.

    I guess this is all less a belief and more why do people still engage with religion. But why do we believe, what is the act of believing? I don't have to believe that the sun will rise every morning, but, I do still believe it will rise every morning. Belief is a whole area of study alone I'm sure.

  • I like how all these answers involving science fail to realize that the scientific method was used exclusively by many scholars and students who had no historical evidence of giving up their religion.

    Empirical evidence is as old as humans, and afaik the modern scientific method has been in use since the Islamic golden age if not older.

    The key here is that many of these people did not consider religion an empirical issue but a philosophical and ethical one. Particularly with the monotheistic religions, this would make sense because you can easily argue that it would be impractical to test for the existence of God.

    I think a better question would be why do people believe in their respective religion if it contains a glaring contradiction(s).

  • I think there's something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that's that "when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don't feel otherwise" is frequently a true statement for the religious.

    I've often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say "I've just had a personal experience" and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.

    Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be "yeah, me too! That's totally normal."

    I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can't relate to religious experiences or don't want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven't had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.

    And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one's beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta ("no-self" in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one's chances and frequency of experiencing these states.

    But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.

    These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one's life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.

    All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don't know these experiences aren't actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)

    Just some followup thoughts:

    • Like I alluded to earlier, meditation can be dangerous. Do your research first and know the risks.
    • There are a ton of good books on these topics. "Stealing Fire" by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal is a good place to start if you're interested in the science of it or The Science of Enlightenment if you want to get a little deeper into the practice.
    • If you want to know my personal beliefs, my beliefs are that beliefs don't matter. Personal experience does. "But do you believe god exists?" Honestly it'd take me a good hour or more to give a proper answer to that question. Let's go with "neither yes nor no" for the short version.
    • Every culture has these experiences. Humans likely have had them since humans have existed.

    • Thanks, I had the same hunch but I didn't yet put into proper words and ideas.

      Do you think, should we extrapolate those experiences to something beyond or just accept it as part of human nature?

      • There's a western meditation guy named "Daniel Ingram" who I have a certain amount of respect for. He readily answers questions about the risks and benefits of meditation-related things as well as the subjective experience of them. But any time he is asked about the "real world" (like, the metaphysical implications of these experiences), he responds that he's "a pragmatist" and won't speculate about the nature of reality or the existence/nonexistence of entities or powers.

        (That said, there is one and only one story he tells that seems to have made him believe certain supernatural claims about the real world. He was "practicing magic" and drew an amber pentagram in the air and someone who hadn't been present at the time later walked into the room and said "you just drew an amber pentagram in the air right here." Or at least that's roughly how he tells the story. And he does seem to believe there's something to that beyond the natural.)

        I'm not quite the purist he is. I don't think it's necessary to straight up refuse to believe anything about the real world or the nature of reality. And I don't think that there's nothing that can/should be gleaned about metaphysics from subjective ("religious") experiences. (My experiences with contemplative practices has definitely changed my mind about some metaphysical things. The nature of conscious and of reality, the existence of capital-G-"God" (though the answer I find most compelling now definitely isn't "yes" or "no"), etc.)

        But it's also important to keep it in perspective. Some of these experiences can feel like the most important thing every to happen to anyone. (That's probably how many/most religions start, honestly. Someone has a mind-blowing experience and tells everybody about it and everybody else grossly misinterprets it because these experiences are ineffable -- can't be put into words -- and before you know it you have the crusades and witch burnings and abstinance-only sex ed.) But a contemplative practice, done well, will tell you not to hold too closely to, well, anything really (potentially "except god"). Coming to some belief and holding it as the most important thing ever or basing your whole personality on it is absolutely problematic.

        My advice is to hold any beliefs you come to from a religious experience (and any other beliefs you have for that matter) "loosely". And I think this is helped by not restricting yourself to one religious system. Borrow from both western and eastern religious traditions. Monotheistic, pantheistic, pagan, etc. Indigenous spiritual practices. Even left-hand-path stuff. The more you do that, the better you drive home to your reptilian brain the point that nobody has a monopoly on religious experience and often those experiences even contradict each other.

        I guess one other thing to mention is that adpting a particular set of religious beliefs can potentially be a boon to one's contemplative practice. But for the reasons above, it can be dangerous.

    • Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would've been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!

      Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality "out there" that is being connected to in those moments.

      But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.

  • I'd say it's partly to find some comfort with life's many uncertainties, and one of several ways to achieve a sense of purpose when struggling for some.

  • Because (Christian) "Faith" is a unique, arguably delusional, cyclical belief system based on feelings. It's similar to the anti-vaccine mentality of "that's just your opinion" when it's not. The biggest difference being that there is no proving or disproving the existence of God.

    And Faith is built on this self-referential system of "you gotta have Faith in God because God is real and God is good and strong Faith will help you continue believing in God when you are otherwise challenged, and weak Faith is a sign that you are straying from God and you should strengthen your Faith by believing in God harder because God is real and God is good..."

    I used to be more religious and also thought "believe in whatever you want to believe in as long as you don't be a dick about it," but that's really been changing a lot lately.

    Christianity has fallen so far and so many self-diagnosed Christians are just the worst type of people that I just couldn't relate to them anymore and felt the need to distance myself.

    There have probably been (speculation because I don't feel like looking up details right now) more deaths in the name of Christianity and the Christian God than any other religion and that continues to this day.

    I contribute modern day deaths from pregnancy complications deprived of needed health care, general lack of other health care for low income families, LGBTQIA2A+ suicides or other deaths, and more to "traditional Christian values".

    Christian Nationalists can go fuck themselves and rot in their own hell they hate so much.

  • Man believes in stories. Such as religion, or money, or companies.

    Ref. Yuval Noah Harari.

  • Our tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous situations sheds light on the origins of cognitive biases like religion. Our minds, shaped by eons of natural selection, are finely tuned to err on the side of caution. Think of a group of ancient hunters traversing the savanna. A rustle in the tall grass could be merely the wind, or it could be a lurking predator. Those who instinctively assume the worst and flee are more likely to survive than those who dismiss the sound and remain vulnerable.

    Over time, this survival advantage has led to the evolution of cognitive models that favor the perception of agency, even when there is none. We are prone to seeing patterns, faces, and intentions in random events because the cost of mistakenly attributing agency is far less than the cost of failing to detect a real threat. This explains why we might see a face in the clouds or feel a presence in a dark room. Religion is a direct byproduct of this phenomenon.

    Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind that every contemporary belief system stems from an uninterrupted chain of development, tracing back to the earliest human societies. This implies that every ideology has enjoyed a measure of success, having endured the test of time. This makes it difficult to definitively assert that one set of beliefs is fundamentally "more correct" than another, as truth is often subjective and dependent on context. After all, the effectiveness of a belief system in enabling a culture to thrive and grow is perhaps the most relevant measure of its "truthfulness."

    If somebody grows up in a religious environment, then religion becomes central to their world model. It's not an isolated concept, it's an integral part of the tapestry of their mind. Our brains, like all physical systems, operate within the constraints of energy efficiency. Assimilating a new idea requires mental effort, as it necessitates restructuring our existing cognitive framework to accommodate the newcomer. This, in turn, translates to expending energy to rebalance the connections within the neural networks of our brain. If a novel concept clashes significantly with our established beliefs, the energetic cost of integration can be substantial. Radical ideas that demand a significant restructuring of our mental models, such as challenging deeply held religious beliefs or political ideologies, may be discarded, deemed "too expensive" from an energetic standpoint.

    This principle helps explain why it's often so difficult to change the views of others, regardless of the soundness of your argument. The strength of the argument alone may not be enough to overcome the inherent inertia of our entrenched belief systems.

423 comments