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Originally Posted by davem

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.

You say 'believe' but it's not the same. You may have faith that the cables will hold, the sun will rise and that the drivers will wait (that's my hardest one to accept ), but this faith/believing is based on experience. The first time you get on an escalator, you might be afraid as the thing looks to be a large set of teeth. The person who may be accompanying you, a parent perhaps, may also be apprehensive as he/she may not have taken one so small onto one of the things. It's practice and repeated affirmation that makes escalator...well...pedestrian and eventually unnoticed. That's definitely not blind faith.

Formendacil speaks of apprehension of becoming an adult, and many of us have been there. Getting married, having children (I'm a goof! yet now have four little ones dependent on me - how screwed up is that?), experiencing the loss of a parent (you can't go home anymore) - it's all about dealing with change. But his analogy, like many (and by no fault of his), falls short. We have seen others grow to adulthood and experience all that that offers and entails. Some of us have even seen people die, and so know what that looks like.

But who has seen what happens after?

No one. We all face the unknown when we die. No one has come back and said what the ride was like. Even Jesus and those that were brought back did not describe how it works, what it felt like, and so we have no idea what to expect. As humans we abhor holes in what we know, and extrapolate (or fantasize) to fill in the gaps.

By the by, near death experiences (nde) are just physiological - like dreams in a way. Note that no nde'er ever comes back stating that he/she was in a very hot place.

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.

People state that belief in the supernatural by peoples across the globe must mean that there's something to it. Each culture can point and say, "see, we all have God in our hearts" or something. Another possible, and more probable, explanation is that a 'believing' brain imparted a survival advantage to our early ancestors. Guessing, intuition, a 'religion' when practiced would allow for a tribe to survive better than one that had to have everything weighed to a nicety. The obvious advantage is that a leader of such a people could get the tribe to accept hardship for the promise of something better later.

And, like davem states, this hardwiring can get used and abused in all sorts of ways. Think that the whole advertising industry takes advantage of this inherited trait.

Hope that that makes some sense.