If you were ever a theist...

[Excited Penguin]

Sometimes we pay a terrible price for emotional comfort, even if the only way to do so is to entertain a fantasy. At the end of the day, I don't think it's worth it, no matter how good it might make you feel to pretend something is real when it's clearly not. And that's because the initial buzz will go away, and all you'll have become is a sad little being who's mentally shackled to a simplistic system of thought that makes everything else seem unimportant by comparison. It's easy to be happy if you pretend there's more to it all than there's any reason to believe there is. With that mindset, everything gets easier. Suffering doesn't matter as much when there's a purpose to the cosmos and someone powerful watching, someone who's going to take care of everything in the end, no matter how or when he's going to do it.

Another way to look at it is to compare it to love. You create a perfect being in your mind, something surreal, when you fall in love with somebody, but what if you love something that never existed to begin with? You may be confusing it, really, with loyalty for some real ideal(s) and/or love for some real person(s). When you're that confused about something though, don't expect to act rationally about it. You have to analyze your own religious feelings to understand what you actually value or have feelings about and are attributing to a immaterial being instead.