Religious belief can serve as a way of improving your confidence or self-esteem, though it can also be damaging to that same sense of self. If you use your belief to support the idea that you are capable of success because god wants you to succeed, I think that you can accomplish more than you would otherwise. If you use your belief to support the idea that we're all fallen people who will never achieve our potential until god grants it to us, then you may be inclined to let life pass you by as you wait. A person with a strong religious faith may use it to remain positive in the face of difficult medical treatment, or he may allow his child to die while he prays for a miraculous intervention.
Religion can be used in the same way any other form of self-delusion can-- to push us closer to our potential, or to pull us further from it. I personally think it's better to build yourself without religion because religion imposes rules and limitations and a dependence on people who might drag you down under the belief that they're helping you. In order to set goals and achieve them and succeed at life in your own terms, the only god you need is the one who stares back at you from the mirror. He or she is more powerful than you might imagine, and has the benefit of existing and being easily reachable.
Religion can be used in the same way any other form of self-delusion can-- to push us closer to our potential, or to pull us further from it. I personally think it's better to build yourself without religion because religion imposes rules and limitations and a dependence on people who might drag you down under the belief that they're helping you. In order to set goals and achieve them and succeed at life in your own terms, the only god you need is the one who stares back at you from the mirror. He or she is more powerful than you might imagine, and has the benefit of existing and being easily reachable.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
