Theists, What Do You Get Out of Religion?

[Mister Agenda]

I'm sorry that you need to be told what your purpose in life.

I never said that meaning was preassigned. People can still find their own meaning and still be a part of something larger than they can even imagine.

That option is not available to ontological naturalists.

Thank you for your concern, though.

I wanted to 'kudo' this post for acknowledging that people can find their own meaning, but your exception for 'ontological naturalists' is puzzling. Would you elaborate, please?

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What I get out of religion is despair.

Yeah . . . Christianity makes me sad. Because once you become "not of this world" and less materialistic you begin to see everyone else from within. You begin to care about their problems. You see the evil around the world and despair.

I hate to pick on you when you're taking the trouble to try to provide a good answer to the question, but you didn't care about people's problems until you became a Christian? Why not?

But on the flip side, with faith I get a role model and also with faith I get the fruits of the holy spirit- love, joy, gentleness, goodness, kindness, peace, patience, self control and faithfulness. with faithfulness i can be confident of grace which I can deal with the problems of the world (which may range from family problems to world poverty)

Faith isn't a requirement to obtain those fruits, except that last one, which seems kind of redundant.

I'm glad you get a lot out of your faith, but it kind of sounds like what you really needed was a peer group concerned about ethics and humanity. A humanist group could provide that without you having to believe in supernatural people and events.