What Gives You Peace....

[brewer]

I think there is a juicy discussion to be had here. Especially concerning this topic's placement in the religious subforum... a discussion about the "validity" (or maybe better put the "rationality" or "reasonableness") of seeking/finding peace through religious exercise.

William James wrote:

" Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say —is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."

It's food for thought, anyway. It requires looking a religion as an activity rather than a set of truth claims. The claims religion makes, false as they may be, nonetheless (as James says) adds an "enchantment" to life and counts as an addition to "the subject's range of life."

I'm interested in hearing an atheist's appraisal of these notions.

Couldn't the same be said for any groups promoting social enrichment/benefit?

This could also be used to explain the influence of cults.