The problem is that if any deity got up and talked to anyone with that attitude, Cobra, that person would never believe them anyway. I'm not trying to attack your position, I'm just saying that I don't think a person who doesn't want to believe in anything ever will because they've already thrown the possibility out the window. We have the inspired word of God in the Bible, but nobody wants to believe *that*. If a magical-looking entity of bright shiny light came up out of the ground and took you to another plane of existence and said, "This is it, my friend. This is what you wondered about," how would that be any more convincing? I don't think anybody *that* focused on attempting to rationalize all elements of life would even be able to comprehend the experience, and would either make up an excuse to get away from it ("Man, that indigestion I got sure made me go nuts that night!") or they would just lose their mind.
Belief is necessity. This life is a horrible one in many ways, and I don't think any of us can look at ourselves and say that there isn't something missing, some piece we just haven't been able to attain. If that wasn't true, nobody would ever desire anything and we'd have simple bliss. We'd never want to read fiction. We'd never feel the need to enjoy other worlds in games that make us feel like we can get away from this one. The Buddhists have it right when they say that desire is suffering: we desire what we don't have, we suffer because of that lack, and if we free ourselves from desire we can free ourselves from suffering. It's obscenely logical, and when you get down to it, a lot of that isn't so different from the Christian approach. Buddhism is a much more humanity-oriented religion as opposed to a heavenly-oriented one, but Christians and Buddhists can both likely agree that Western society is really geared toward the fulfillment of desire, the flaw being that no matter how many desires you fill, another will always pop up in its place.
Why do I mention this? Because I think it speaks to the kind of people we can be. Lots of people focus on lots of different things in trying to fulfill their areas of perceived need, but I think what a lot of it comes down to is that we feel there needs to be something *more*. Some of us pursue it via religion, others do it through fiction, be they movies, games, or books. For me, if I didn't believe in something beyond my day to day life, I would kill myself. In a heartbeat. My life is a long string of hardship and misery broken up mostly by the occasional good time spent with friends, or time spent creating things (music, poetry, art, whatever) that express my beliefs and feelings, or time spent enjoying things created by others that help me forget how stuck I am, how awful everything is, how my daily life is a fucking misery which makes me hate everyone around me more with every passing day. If this is all that I believed life to be, I guarantee you I would kill myself. That doesn't mean that I simply chose to believe in more because doing otherwise would end in disaster, it means I was actually willing to consider that other people might be right. There were a number of times in my life when I was almost convinced that there was nothing out there and that life was utterly meaningless, that we were no better than animals. I listened to those voices in society and I ended up deciding that they were wrong. I came to this conclusion through personal experience and study, through looking at what I felt I'd learned in my life through interactions with other people, through knowledge, through the study of art and human expression, through the various religions I'd looked at, and through my study of history. Maybe some of you have it so easy that you can actually say that even if life is meaningless, you're fine, but that's probably because you don't have any responsibility or burden that ties you to things that you hate. Maybe my perspective would be different if that weren't the case for me, but I've been working pretty much full time since I was 16. I graduated high school early and got thrown into doing the things that I hated most, and I had to because I wasn't good enough at or singly devoted enough to any of the things I loved in order to make money doing them. My dad died and left little more than enough for my mother to exist on. There wasn't enough money for me to pursue college, and I couldn't do it on my own like my sister was able to, God bless her. So perspective might have something to do with it, but...
I don't know. At this point I'm just going off on a tangent and I'm too tired to know if I even have a point. I'm going to have a glass of wine and go the fuck to bed.
