The "Benefits" of Faith in Evil Spirits and Evil
Magical Beings
Psychological studies have found that highly religious people can feel their
lives have little or no meaning or value or importance. It was found that these
believers tended to think that evil divine/supernatural agents were influencing
the actions of murderers. It stands to reason that if it is hard to feel your
life has meaning, you make it harder by imagining such malignant entities. An
atheist would be better off. It was found that people who needed a sense of
meaning in their lives were prone to blaming say demons on what the murderers
did than on his or her suffering great abuse in the past which ruined him or her
as a person.
Bizarrely, many believers get a sense of meaning in their suffering not only
from the sweet side of religion but the nasty side as well. If prayer makes them
feel better, thinking Satan is doing terrible things to them helps as well. Is
that because thinking magical evil forces exist is based on assuming that good
magical forces exist too and are more powerful? Are magical good entities and
magical bad ones two sides of the coin of meaningfulness? If so, then faith in
God is hardly to be praised. People feel they get power over evil by embracing
it and is that what those believers are doing? Do they deep down hope that the
evil beings will go away and torment somebody else?
If you believe that God hurts innocent little babies, you take it on faith that
he knows what he is doing and in some way it is for the best. But it is only
faith. You don't really know. You are looking up to a power that may be evil.
You are letting yourself open up to evil. No believer denies that it is possible
that the supernatural could be evil or could be doing good not because it is
good but because it acts whimsically. It could as easily kill you as cure you.
If your life has been good up to now, you don't know what it is going to do
tomorrow. Faith in God is intrinsically a placebo - it relieves the fear of a
random uncaring universe and a random uncaring God.
There is no shortage of religious people who secretly say prayers that God will
hurt others. Others are more open about it. Some of those who try to do evil
with prayer are telling themselves that God will protect their victims from too
much harm. They reason, "I don't want to kill Mary but just want her to lose her
car." They may reason that by asking for some calamity to befall her at least
they could be saving her from a worse one. Some pray for wealthy relatives to
die suddenly so that they might get the inheritance and they hope God will make
it up to them for the tragic death in the afterlife.
If there is a God, they could be right! Belief in God is the problem.