# Religion is Not a Source of Comfort
#essay #phil

There's a popular notion that religiosity provides emotional support: a balm in times of pain; a source of strength in times of struggle. The reason for this misconception is obvious: religion is guaranteed to rear its head during hard times. Religion coincides with desperation, and we charitably assume that adherents must be getting something out of it.

The most prominent example is when somebody dies. In fact, death is just about the only time I ever have religion personally foisted upon me, and reflecting on a recent bereavement is the impetus for this post. Death is the only time I can think of where my culture considers it totally verboten to contradict religious mythology and expects a show of adherence from nonbelievers. We are expected to voice agreement with clichés like "she's in a better place now" that are ridiculous and, frankly, insulting. Heaven forfend that you reply "actually, she's dead and gone"! Really, you have to put up with it for a while before you're tempted to say something of the sort, because the last thing you want to do is hurt someone who is already hurting. You wouldn't want to take away their source of comfort. (Or mark yourself as an asshole atheist.)

But how comforting can it really be? Anyone who actually believes that ought to be happy when someone dies, not make an effort to convince themselves. The death of a loved one is painful, and repeating lies doesn't actually make it any better. And there's another dimension to this that I don't think is always obvious in a funereal context where everyone generally liked the deceased and wants to make everyone happy: they say these things not because it's hard to cope with the reality of death, but because it's hard to cope with their belief that the dead person might be burning in hell.[^hell] Religion offers comfort for a pain of its own creation.

Mortality is just the tip of the iceberg. Some notion of ultimate right and wrong, comeuppance for evildoers and justice for their victims: this is the comfort of a panopticon. Becoming a better person, gaining wealth, and other imagined rewards are just that — imagined. The only real comfort religion has to offer is a community, invariably one you will be exiled from if you fail to demonstrate sufficient adherence to its rules and belief in the products of its imagination. If you expect religion to make you happy, you will be sorely mistaken.

The correlation between anguish and religious expression should be understood the other way around: religion is far more likely to be a symptom of mental distress than a solution to it. Have you ever heard of someone losing their mind and... becoming an atheist? I'm sure it happens, but I've never heard of it, whereas people lose their mind and become religious about a thousand times a day. Then they tell all their new religious friends their conversion story, and their alarming experience of psychosis gets transmuted into a touching brush with the Divine.

Everything I said above has been borne out in my own life. I'm at my most religious when I'm severely depressed; I entertain belief in an agonizing afterlife only as a result of drug abuse, poor mental state, and the delusive backdrop of my religious upbringing. Comfort comes from immersion in observable reality: when you die, you're gone; nothing bad will happen. Nobody can hear you think and judge you for it. There's no need to stress about what the eye in the sky thinks of your behavior. Your life here, now, is all that matters; enjoy yourself and live in the moment.

It's still painful when someone I love dies. Sometimes I wish I could retreat into delusion. But accepting reality beats seeking out the cold comfort of belief and all the extra pain it brings with it.


[^hell]: I realize not all religions have a hell, but any afterlife must have *some* quality or it wouldn't be an afterlife. The observable end of a life produces anxiety on its own — it reminds you of your own mortality, raises questions of how you will go on without them, etc. — but belief in an afterlife produces an additional anxiety about what it might consist of.