Why should I believe? This is the question I can't seem to answer. There appears to be no good reason for me to believe in god, despite the fact that some may insist I have to. If that is the case, then I don't see why I have free will to decide in the first place. Given that, if belief in god requires faith, evidence for it cannot exist, I am free to understand my reality without including a creator or almighty being in the picture. I have found it to be quite pleasant to the point where I often feel sorry for those who do believe. I suspect that they do not want my pity, though, as bearing a cross of their own has some significance to them. As it stands, the subordination and guilt is not appealing to me when I don't even feel that the benefits are all that great.
Let's start with this lifetime. One claim of faith is that it will make you happy. We can use research to help us estimate our relative happiness levels in any given situation. Dan Gilbert explained this in his TED lecture. It doesn't matter if you just lost your leg or if you just won the lottery, in 3 months, you'll be just as happy as if you had experienced the other. No amount of divine euphoria will sustain because it will normalize. If someone were to plead to me that giving my life to Jesus will make me happier than ever, I would simply point out that my extreme happiness would become a normalcy and thus lose its charm. After all, happiness is a relative state; we can only comprehend being happy because we know what being sad is. Remove sadness and you no longer have appreciation for happiness. Even if you claim that pride plays a part in the normalcy, the expectancy, of happiness, you still cannot contend with the happiness we manufacture when we need it most.
The difference between real happiness and manufactured happiness lies in how you obtain it. In the end, though, they are both just as effective. While, from an honest perspective, I would much rather achieve my happiness through a positive occurrence (being the best at playing a game, for instance) instead of through accepting and owning up to a negative (acknowledging that I suck at games and just playing for the experience), the two opposite situations have different implications on future avenues for happiness. If I become used to positive happiness, it takes increasingly more positive things to placate my high dopamine levels and maintain that happiness. However, if my happiness comes from my acceptance of my reality, it does not take much to give me a little endorphin rush. This is all to say that Jesus cannot make me happy without also teaching me to suffer. I can get that from anyone, not just the son of god.
There is another aspect of belief that I admit to being nonplussed about. That is the community aspect. Obviously, if you go to church, you form friendships within your community and you become a part of a large support group network. For agnostics who have fallen out of faith from the inside, losing their religious friends is one of the harshest realities they face when considering leaving their religion. For myself, I could not imagine living in a world where everyone agreed with me. In fact, one of the main reasons why I moved to New York City 5 years ago was because of the diversity of race and culture to be found here. The lure of assimilation is more of a repulsion.
I once read an article that stated that atheists get off easy because they don't believe anything that requires them to sacrifice. Beyond the near-sightedness of this claim (see the above statement about agnostics leaving their church), there is a flaw in the logic. Who says we have to suffer? Why does sacrifice have to come built into a given ideology? Why can't it come as a consequence of following one's dreams instead of following dogma? It seems to me that some paths through belief are paved by masochists who become, in turn, sadists that want others to feel their pain. Not only is this undesirable, it is quite creepy. It is said that Pope John Paul II was favored by his peers because he beat himself with his belt and slept on the floor for penance. Why would a sane person want this?
Back to the evidence point. I think it goes without saying that I could not possibly unlearn everything I know about cosmology, biology, logic, and philosophy simply to believe. If I were to have faith, I would need to either find something real that contradicts my current knowledge or work the concept of god into a non-literal mental nook. This already feels like a boring tact. While there are very smart people who believe in god, it does not appear that any of the ones who originally began as atheists took the sane route of reasoning their way to belief. I think I would need something of a vision, a surreal experience, to pluck me from my rationality. Once my rationality is gone, though, there's no telling how far I would go to destroy every thought I ever had before.
Let's move on to the real fun, though; the afterlife. As the comedian Jim Jeffries points out, hell can't be as bad as Christians paint it. If god represents the light, then he is obviously beholden to sell his path as the way to go and the opposite path as a blatantly bad choice. However, if one admires the logic of Pascal's wager, then surely you'll appreciate this idea: the devil has no reason to punish those who advance his efforts. He would reward them, I think. If the guy is as bad and as crafty as everyone claims he is, then he would not dispose of his loyal agents. Because the bible is supposedly the word of god, it is admittedly a one-sided affair. Similarly, as other comedians have stated, heaven sounds like it is populated by the most boring people.
There isn't much in faith for me, I must say. As a happy, healthy, sane, smart and optimistic atheist, I don't know what anyone could offer me to make me desire otherwise. Even if they did offer it, that wouldn't sound like a savior to me. More like a soul monger... pardon me while I question the motives.
2 nibbles: