Why some people have a need to believe in God seems to me no different than a need to believe in flat Earth or aliens secretly visiting Earth or bigfoot roaming forests - because it is fun, for some people, to believe in fairytales.
Indeed, everyone needs to take a pause from a real world and go into the imaginary one--be it by playing video games, reading novels, watching TV shows; it's just that religious people (and believers in other fantasies) do it all the time, they don't get out of it.
Now why is that? That's perhaps a question for a psychologist. Fairytales offer banal world which maybe brings people back when they were little kids with banal minds, when they also didn't have to worry about grownup problems. So perhaps being religious, or believing in aliens and flat Earth, is analogous to sucking thumb and lying in fetal position.
Indeed, everyone needs to take a pause from a real world and go into the imaginary one--be it by playing video games, reading novels, watching TV shows; it's just that religious people (and believers in other fantasies) do it all the time, they don't get out of it.
Now why is that? That's perhaps a question for a psychologist. Fairytales offer banal world which maybe brings people back when they were little kids with banal minds, when they also didn't have to worry about grownup problems. So perhaps being religious, or believing in aliens and flat Earth, is analogous to sucking thumb and lying in fetal position.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
