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Of course belief is necessary – we believe lots of things all the time. When I go to cross the street at a pedestrian crossing I wait till the traffic stops & step into the road, believing that all the drivers will wait for the lights to change before they start off. When I get into a lift I believe that the cables will hold & I won't go plummeting 18 floors to my death. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.
But this approach is necessary to function in the world & is entirely different to simply believing a text to be the word of God. Belief, in other words, serves an evolutionary function, it is a survival tool. Unfortunately, it has become divorced from its practical & wholly necessary purpose, & combined with the human capacity for creative fantasy has come to produce all kinds of odd ideas & attitudes.
Experience of the transcendent, on the other hand, is a different thing, & has nothing to do with belief. Of course, books (whether novels or sacred' texts) may open us up to an experience of higher/deeper aspects/levels of 'reality'. This is the Eucatastrophic experience. But just as the fact that we can experience this through Tolkien's works but this does not prove that they are literally true history I would say the same about the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, etc. I'm not arguing that you don't experience 'transcendence' through the words of the Bible, I'm just arguing that that doesn't prove its historical veracity.
Formendacil I suppose the difference between becoming an adult & the afterlife is that we know (barring accidents) that we will grow up – it has nothing to do with 'belief'. The afterlife is precisely a matter of belief, & hence is 'optional' from the point of view of whether we accept it or not. Its not about a 'fear' of entering into a 'higher' state of being, its whether the idea appeals.
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