The Need to Believe

By Zach Black

I learned a long time ago it is not worth arguing with religious folk. You can’t hope to achieve much trying to enlighten mystical, superstitious, and weak minded people. Why use logic and reason to argue or debate someone who has a deep rooted psychological need to resist it? It is like arguing the shape of a cloud with a blind man. People have a NEED to BELIEVE. I can’t help but see their faith for what it is: a neurotic coping mechanism deeply anchored in the character and emotional structure of a delusional and crippled victim. An even sadder fact is these righteous, pious pursuers of heaven will probably never recover. Their entire lives, security, thought process, logic, reasoning, longing and general impression of the world around them is built on such fairy tales. These very people burrow into the trusting and delicate minds of children their own fears and delusions. If faith based mentality was replaced over night with a rational objective approach to reality, most of these individuals emotional and mental health would crumble in days.

Faith is rooted in fear, a fear of the unknown, the unpredictable, and most of all, the fear of living a life free of conflicting neurotic mechanisms. It is one in which believers are entirely dependent on as a permanent copping mechanism and is little more than a delicate house of cards which represses guilt, rage, fear, lust, etc.

If you doubt that it is the fear of losing “control” and letting go that fuels religious fever and devotion, consider this question: why would organized religion launch crusades to exterminate entire cultures, population and races? It is done through the claim they are doing God’s work by ridding the world of savages, heathens, beastly, coarse, perverse and deviant people. It was too much for the Holy to see free, unrestrained happy people, half naked and not ashamed of their own passions. These “primitive and Godless” people threatened to expose the fear and inherent irrational contradictions that their culture, religion and faith rest and depend on. It was seen necessary to rid the world of people who reminded them of what it is like to not live in a world based on fear, control, rigidity and repression. The righteous will not tolerate being reminded of what they gave up in the way of life, regarding love and happiness, to pursue their faith. Ironically, they gave up the one thing they claim they value above anything else. The only thing they hope to reunite in some mystical intangible way is everlasting bliss with their Lord via their very essence and soul. It was necessary to burn thousands of women alive simply because they reminded these miserable, impotent men that they themselves once felt alive in their groins.  What could be more murderously provoking than to arouse the last bit of lust in some miserable, resigned, hateful shell of a man who longs for death?

The righteous and holy will always attempt to remove and exterminate others who think differently, who don’t reinforce their delusions, including those that are equally crippled holy men of a different cloth. After all, what if the other religion is right? There was no clause for that in the gospels. So if they are right, that would make you wrong, and a cloud of anxiety and horror  surely awaits. Is there any other reason or explanation to make light of how intelligent, educated worldly and presumably logical well adjusted people could ignore scientifically proven facts that are in sharp contradictions to their faith? Many scientists themselves are still spending their entire lives trying to prove evolution is false and that carbon dating and the known age of the universe around us is grossly inaccurate. In the opposition of all evidence and reason they still will not let go of their delusions. They can’t. It is simply something they are incapable of doing as it would mean an end to the fiction they have grown dependent on to cope and function. It would also mean a dissolution of the very deep emotional layers of repression and rigidity they have spent a life time building.

Not to mention for the first time in their lives they are unsure of what lies beyond.

If a man of average intelligence reviews the idea of God with a rational objective approach he will come to one conclusion: God is possible, but highly unlikely, and with this, one more Agnostic is born. God is nothing but an imaginary friend for adults.

The universal need to believe should be looked at as a mass induced psychosis. It is a protective mechanism evolved by early man after the horror, uncertainty and isolation he must have felt when leaving the comfort of the jungle for the open fields towards the unknown.