Do You Ever Miss God?

[Angrboda]

I miss it, sometimes.  There's a comfort in just believing, it doesn't matter what it is.  Just to believe.

Do you find you have secular beliefs which you just believe in spite of the lack of supporting evidence?

By lack of supporting evidence I take it you mean to imply that God lacks supporting evidence and that the secular parallel would be the same. I had supporting evidence for God in the form of personal experiences, so I think you're searching for the wrong parallel. I like to believe that this country will survive Trump. I like to believe that consciousness is a product of the brain, though I recognize elements of that argument are missing. I believe that things can "just be" without there needing to be any higher explanation than the laws of physics, but I don't have any real evidence of that. It's more a negative case that the alternative is not justified. And I know that my personality "trends" toward the atheistic and liberal. There are going to be things I believe just because of the biases inherent those stances, in being human. It's impossible, I think, to escape our biases. As a result there are going to be things I just believe because believing them is just the type of person that I am. Even as a theist, there was a strong bias toward atheism in me. So, I suppose I'd say yes there are.

I think the ultimate form of just believing comes in fictional stories. We absorb the characters, and if the story is good, we just believe. There's a parallel element in all the stories of Krishna and Siva and Kali and Hanuman, that you don't necessarily judge them to be true or false. The stories themselves transcend the question of what is real. I imagine it's a part of the experience of our inner world writ large in the outer world. It's an interplay of themes and archetypes, all of which are both true and not, fiction and truth. What do we get from the experience of watching a movie or a television series? We put the question of truth on hold and immerse ourselves in the characters. We get so involved, we feel genuine loss when a character dies or has a setback. The feelings transcend the question of whether the character is real. They are real to us.