Why Everyone Should Believe in Santa Claus

What believers fear about atheists

• Do you ever feel that you’re a small part of something much larger than yourself, something big and wonderful?
• Are you ever swept with a sense of awe and wonder?
• Does injustice trouble you? Do you feel a responsibility for your fellow human beings? Do you experience a sense of moral outrage when people are mistreated?
• Do you ever bask in the knowledge that you are loved?

Notice I didn’t ask if you believe in God. You could answer an emphatic yes to all these questions and still not be religious. None of these things has any necessary connection to the supernatural. And yet they get to the heart of what seems to bother many believers about atheists.

A new way to look at “Religion gives people comfort, so don’t take it away”

You may have heard this one. It’s not an argument that religion is true, it’s an argument that it’s useful. It’s invoked to discourage skeptics, and it rests partly on the maddening assumption that critiquing an idea is equivalent to forcibly ripping it out of someone’s hands. It usually leads to heated discussions about whether or not religion truly makes believers happy, or whether its comfort outweighs the guilt and fear that are often part of religiosity.

But there’s another major problem with this argument.

Why do believers make such a big deal of faith?

Let me state a few obvious things, and then I’ll explain why I bothered spelling them out: