I am in about the opposite situation from the OP - the world has provided me sufficient evidence to convince me with certainty that the benevolent creator god positied by various religions does not exist, but it has not managed to convince me to a comforting absolute certainty that there isn’t some sort of semi-powerful extraphysical being, who’s whispering pleasing lies to certain people for presumably malevolent reasons, and who might have the ability to recreate my consciousness in an hellish post-life simulation and then torture me for its own mad amusement. Seriously - you can’t disprove this.
(I admit it - I’ve been exposed to christanity-based religions too much.)
So anyway, the impurity of my atheism forces me to endure bouts of worry and uncertainty that my life may be being overseen by a mad malevolent dictator who just waits for the opportunity to get its claws on me. Pure atheism would be relative bliss.
By the way, I recently read something (relatively) original regarding the idea of God, which is pretty surprising considering I thought I’d read it all.
In the book “The Mind’s I”, one of the stories (I think it’s “Non Serviam” by Stanislew Lem), there occurs these events:
A human creates a civilization of artificial, human-level-sentient entities inside a computer simulation. The human watches the civilization grow and he is, for all intents and purposes, a God in terms of the power he could exercise over them. He can read any of their thoughts, and could, in principle, effect changes to their world such as smiting or rewarding or whatever by sending commands to the computer.
However, he chooses to *never *interfere with the world because it would interfere with the experiment’s natural progression. This is not to mention other obstacles such as: the unfairness of helping some and not others, having them lose self-reliance and expect “God” to fix every little thing that happens.
The civilization inside does eventually come up with the idea of a God, and endlessly debates it, while the real “God” (the human, remember) is watching it all.
The creatures at one point talk about a concept of a heaven and hell. “God” thinks about how he could, in principle, do such a thing, but can’t imagine doing so due to the silliness of it all. It would involve taking dead simulated entities, and restarting them in a separate computer in a simulated paradise or inferno (based on his inevitably arbitrary judgment), and “God” just doesn’t see the point of that.
When funding runs out, the experiment will be shut down unceremoniously.
Okay, so that idea’s basically been discussed before, but the first-person viewpoint adds a whole new impact to it.
I’m not sure what my point is in bringing that up, other than that it’s just something cool to think about.