What Other Harm Is there in Believing?

Belief in God (or any god) requires you to embrace notions completely foreign to everyday experience and language, which is rooted in that experience. What is a nonmaterial entity that is said to be infinite and unlimited? Our natural notion of entity contains the elements of matter and therefore limits. To be is to be something. To be something is to have a finite set of attributes -- a nature -- by which we understand what an entity is capable of. (So-called nonmaterial things such as justice and love describe actions, feelings, and relations between living beings.) 

But God falls outside of this framework, just as by definition it falls outside of reality. In other words, God and related concepts cannot be integrated with anything else we know. It requires one to disregard logic and context in certain matters. It requires one to engage in what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called "doublethink." I don't see how that serves one's well-being.

Tim Whitmarsh, in Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, suggests that logical thought developed in Greece partly because no texts were regarded as sacred and beyond question, not even the epic poems: "There was nothing heretical about undermining the Homeric text, since it was not sacred scripture." Whitmarsh also writes:

The Greeks' lack of sacred scripture was not in fact a lack at all. It facilitated the great cultural revolutions of the classical period, which saw theological explanations for the way of the world displaced and new, naturalistic explanations coming in. To have a shared cultural reference point that could be debated, explored, or rewritten without fear of blasphemy was a huge cultural stimulus, without which the Greek intellectual tradition would, conceivably, have been hobbled from the start.