In a religious thread, talking about religion, you state that all religious people are sheep following an authoritarian regime, and you say it isn’t a statement against religion?
You keep telling yourself that.
What kind of benefits are you talking about?
Benefits to praying to God you don’t believe in, or benefits to claiming to be a believer so that you can blend with other believers, or the society consisted of believers?
I don’t really know about believing in Santa Clause because I’ve never been a believer, but I can think of benefits for parents to make their kids believe in Santa Clause. 
Well, you certainly couldn’t get elected to public office in the U.S. as an admitted atheist.
From Micheal Shermer’s book How We Believe,
we are pattern-seeking animals and these patterns help us make decisions that better our survival.
These patterns can be grouped into four categories:
- Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood.
- Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth.
- Type 1 Hit: not believing a falsehood.
- Type 2 Hit: believing a truth.
We’ve developed a Belief Engine which helps us seek patterns that reduce our errors in thinking, which increases our survival.
So a benefit of not believing in God would be not making Type 1 Errors (since there is no God), and thus taking personal responsibility for one’s place in the world (for one’s morals, decisions, acts, thoughts, etc.)
There might be a few exceptions, Eve, with, say, a very popular and qualified candidate running in a very secular district. But the substance of your statement is very true. Heck, lots of mid-level management jobs will be more difficult for someone who makes their atheism known.
I’m baffled at how many religious people don’t acknowledge the net PR benefit of declaring your religious faith in a majority-religious society. Such a view seems to confuse being religious – which does indeed sometimes demand sacrifice – with claiming to be religious.
How so? I’m not sure I see the connection.
If we are here “by accident”—if we are what we are and do what we do just because the universe happened to work out that way—where does that leave room for taking personal responsibility? I guess what I’m saying is that personal responsibility presupposes some sort of free will, and I find free will more compatible with theism than with naturalism.
(Plus, if there’s no God, then whom are we responsible to?)
Well, free will means just what it says. It’s free from anything, even a god.
Thus, you’re on your own in this world. We’re not responsible to anything or anyone.
However, to prevent social chaos and to improve our chances of survival by formulating reliable bonds with others, we’ve developed morals and mores.
We’re responsible to those. (Otherwise we’d be ‘cast-out’ of many a loop.)
We’ve developed an idea of God to help us (or scare us?) in following these morals.
But that idea of God is not needed for those with enough courage and strength to live truthfully on their own.
The idea of God is simply wasteful, in that you are contracting out your responsibility for yourself to a third party. And when things go wrong, many put the blame on said third party. Which is convenient, but in a way cowardly.
So free will is absolutely not theistic. It is it’s opposite.
beajerry, I suspect you and I are working at different levels or using different meanings of “free will.” But that’s not surprising; free will is a notoriously tricky thing to talk about. I don’t want to debate that here, but I do want to mention a couple of things that occurred to me while pondering your words.
You claim that someone like yourself who does not believe in God is better—more courageous, stronger, more willing to take responsibility for himself—than someone who does believe in God. On the other hand, I’m sure there are many believers who think that believing in God makes them better people (i.e. better people than nonbelievers, or better people than they would be if they did not believe). Psychologists probably have a name for this: people use their deeply held beliefs to feel better about themselves, and it’s not limited to religious beliefs. Liberals think that they are better people for their liberal beliefs, and conservatives think they’re better people because of their conservative beliefs. So, one answer to the OP’s question is that believing in God can make one think more highly of oneself—but then, so can disbelieving in God.
Observation number two: Let’s grant your claim that disbelieving makes you a better person (more courageous, more responsible, etc.). I don’t think this would be true of everybody, but it could well be true for some, yourself included. Well then, if God does exist, he would not want you to believe in him if you are actually better off disbelieving! It would be reasonable for him to hide himself from you, to grant you the benefits of not believing. In fact, some have posited that this is precisely what God does do: he hides himself from human beings to grant them freedom (to choose whether or not to believe) and maturity (from facing life on their own).
“Every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true.” -Blaise Pascal, quoted in Richard Elliott Friedman’s excellent and relevant book The Disappearance of God.
Well, this is where we’d probably have to jump off on the agree-to-disagree train.
Sure, I believe it is better to be fully responsible for your free will, but I do not discount that many use the symbol of a god to help them do so.
Those that use such a symbol/tool also recognize it as such. So they are able to transcend such a symbol in improving their responsibility to their free will.
They do not rely on a god as a literal thing (such as Fundies do).
Simply said, some use God (symbol) as a tool and discard it when the job is done, and that’s cool. Some use God (literal) as a crutch and are disabled the rest of their lives, and that is, to me, ignorant and lazy.
And, I’d agree with you that people use their beliefs to boost their self-esteem. Those that actively question their beliefs to find truth break free of that trap.
As for your observation #2: it seems like a nice mind game, but a little to convoluted for me. More of a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument perhaps?