A psychologist examines the question of why people believe in God...
All we can ever know for certain about death is that a living person grows strangely still. We each have a fantasy about what happens after death and this fantasy determines how we see the purpose of life. If we see death as the end of our identity, the purpose of our life becomes making this life satisfactory.
There is an infinite number of ways in which we might choose to define "satisfactory", but whichever we choose becomes our purpose.
If we see death as the doorway to another life, we have to decide whether this next life will be better than this one. To give us hope, we decide that the next life will be better. This raises the question of justice. Do all people go on to this better life, or are there standards that have to be met?
A sense of justice leads us to choose standards, and in doing so we condemn ourselves to living this life in terms of the next. If you set standards which you can easily reach, you limit the amount of self-inflicted pain you will suffer, but if you acquire, say, a Calvinist conscience you set yourself impossible standards, and berate yourself for your constant failure to live up to them.
I have argued in the past that religion as I have known it, is arranged to ensure you never measure up. The concept of original sin is a primary example of the inherent bias within Christianity that assumes mankind as automatically fallible and unable to reach by any means, the level of goodness expected to win the grace of God. While many think this is a means of motivating good behavior through humility, I see it more of a self-defeating concept that causes many to give up hope of ever being good enough. After all, when the standard is being measured against an unattainable constant, the strain of reaching becomes a discouraging and futile effort. Add to this, the stipulation that it is not one's place to question God's plan, and it suddenly becomes a prison of condemnation without explanation, from which no escape can be made.
I spent many years there.
My metamorphosis from doubt-filled God-fearing uncertainty, to the logic and serenity of atheism, was a sudden and final rejection of the burden of guilt and irrationality I always felt in the practice of religion. Many have judged me harshly for this. None the least of which have been my own fellow Conservatives.
In light of the subject at hand, I delved into the archives to revive my original post on the subject here:
The Godless Conservative