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