Someone asked on Quora why people have an inherent “need” to believe in God. There are probably a number of reasons why some people might feel that they “need” to believe in God – but there is one that especially needs to be discussed.Who hasn’t heard tons of stories about people who endured significant difficulties attesting to how it was their faith in God that got them through their hard times? It is unsurprising that many people that conclude from this that believing in God makes someone more resilient to difficulties than they would be without that belief.
Granted – this conclusion doesn’t actually constitute proof, or even evidence, of God’s existence. It does, however, cause many people to conclude that even if the weight of the evidence does not compel them to believe that God exists, that it might be worthwhile for them to do whatever mental gymnastics they have to in order to believe in God anyway.
Personally, though, having tasted from both the waters of belief and the waters of nonbelief, I have found that believing in God did not make me more resilient to the hardships I face in life, but less resilient. And though I can not know for certain, I highly suspect that many people who credit their resilience to their faith in God really found their resilience despite their faith, not because of it.
When I abandoned my belief in God, I did not do so in hopes of gaining any resilience, nor for the purpose of testing how it would affect my resilience. I did it out of a commitment to logic and reason. I examined what my reasons were for continuing to believe in God, and I found that those reasons were not rationally defensible. However, very quickly, I found that no longer believing in God didn’t result in me losing a pillar that gave me strength. Rather, over the following days and weeks, I came to realize that it was a weight being lifted off of my shoulders.
Though I realize and always did realize that there are people who’s life circumstances are worse than my own, that never was able to change the fact that some very basic, natural desires of my heart were unfulfilled and with an unfathomably low prognosis of ever being fulfilled. This was due to immutable traits of mine, as well as life circumstances that weren’t really that much in my control either. As time went on, my circumstances improved so as to give me other areas in my life that I could focus on instead of those painful aspects of my life. This allowed me to be less fixated on those things – but still, these voids in my life still hurt, and believing in God didn’t change that.
The notion that there was an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing being who could have easily either given me a way to fulfill those desires or (at His option) simply lifted the burden of those desires from my heart didn’t comfort me. This was because as time went on, it became abundantly clear that even though He would have the ability to do so, it seemed highly unprobably that he ever actually would do so.
This left me in a very painful position. Regarding God’s decision to neither give me a way to see my desires fulfilled nor lift them from my heart, I could either conclude that that decision was justified or unjustified. For a while, I concluded that the decision had to be justified if God made that decision. I held the belief at that time that God had a wonderful master-plan for the Universe – but that that master-plan didn’t involve me ever finding personal happiness while on Earth. Seeing my very happiness as being so expendable that God could have such a wonderful master-plan that didn’t include fulfilling those deep desires (or for at least freeing me of them) definitely didn’t make me feel like the Beloved Child of God that religion is supposed to make us feel like.
Later, I came to the other conclusion – that God’s decision to neither allow my desires to be fulfilled nor to free me of them was an unjustified decision. It was during this time period that I would a few times a week chew out God to His face – raging at the Deadbeat Creator for bothering to create me without a plan for my happiness. As a trans-woman, this included asking Him how an all-knowing being couldn’t make up his flipping mind whether He wanted to create a man or a woman.
In the week or so after I stopped believing these rants at God stopped. Immediately the rants began to be much shorter, because almost as soon as they began I would realize that I have no evidence of there being a God in the first place, and therefore feel no more need to shout at Him. Within a week or so, these rants stopped altogether. It did not feel like I had any pent-up need to rant at God but nobody to rant to. On the contrary – any need to rant evaporated. True, I still had unfulfilled desires – but the lack of their fulfillment was no longer a sign that a supposedly all-loving God didn’t find me worth the effort of fulfilling them. Furthermore, the unfilfilled desires were no longer a sign of some supernatural being having created me and then abandoned me to the agony of these unfilfilled desires.
Granted – in times of loneliness, one can often desire company that doesn’t come from the presence of others. There exist plenty of regimens of spirituality designed to help fulfill this desire with the concept of God, your friend when you are alone. However, there can also be spiritual regimens to help one find this company without a God by consciously connecting to aspects of one’s self. Granted, as society has for so long mandated theism to one degree or another, such non-theistic regimens of spirituality require a bit more trail-blazing than theistic ones – even more-so if you also want your spiritual regimen to be free of other equally unsubstantiated and equally problematic beliefs, such as reincarnation and karma. But though the need for such trailblazing may present an obstacle, that obstacle isn’t an insurmountable one.
