Self-Awareness and an All-Loving God

One of the most common defenses of religious belief is something along the lines of "if it makes people feel good, what's the problem?" See this, for an example of this argument (scroll to Day 5 - "I know plenty of religious people who believe because it helps them in life and makes them feel better. That seems a pretty good reason to me, even if I don’t share the view"). While there are many problems with this approach, I'd like to highlight one: it encourages people to have an inflated impression of themselves. Here's some science:

Thomaes found that people with unrealistically inflated opinions of themselves, far from proving more resilient in the face of social rebuffs, actually suffer more because of it. Some psychologists hold that "positive illusions" provide a mental shield that buffers its bearers from the threats of rejection or criticism. But according to Thomaes, realistic self-awareness is a much healthier state of mind.

The experiment dealt only with 9-12 year olds, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to extrapolate that to adults, as well. I don't think it's too controversial to assert that people with artificially high opinions of themselves suffer more when they encounter evidence that they may not be as great as they think they are.

Part of the appeal of most religions is that they stress the cosmic importance of the individual. The fact that there's a higher power isn't really the significant part. The significant part is that this higher power cares about YOU! Most religions artificially elevate the importance of each individual as being part of "God's plan" or something analogous.

The problem with this is that people aren't that important. People's importance comes from themselves and other people (and sometimes pets). People can be massively important in the world, but they can never be as important as religion promises that they are. Evidence of this is everywhere. It doesn't take a lot of life experience to realize that every individual is not that important to any grand scheme of the universe.

When religious people encounter enough of this evidence, it's crushing. People get used to this idea of themselves an indispensable part of a perfect plan. Once enough evidence to the contrary is amassed, people generally go one of two directions. They either get really depressed, or they embrace full irrationality, ignore the evidence, and recommit themselves to their beliefs. Readers of this blog will probably recognize that neither of these is a positive outcome.

Of course, there are a lot of other problems with the "I believe it because it feels good" argument, but we'll save those for another day.