What are the benefits of being religious?
in Philosophy ·
placidranger said:A sense of agency—actually feeling like you're at the wheel—is pretty much the bedrock of satisfaction. People who feel helpless are miserable; it’s that simple. There’s a mountain of research out there on the "locus of control" and how tightly it’s tethered to happiness and general life satisfaction. The question is: can you actually replicate that feeling without just lying to yourself?Let’s circle back to your example—but let's swap out the rats for people, and instead of a pool, they're swimming in the ocean. A pool would be way too small for that kind of scale anyway.
Most people—the vast majority, anyway—understand that the ocean isn't infinite. They know there’s land somewhere out there. If you were stuck out in the middle of the Atlantic for any significant stretch of time, your mind would eventually settle on one of two tracks. It’s either "hang in there, salvation is just around the bend" or "I’m thirsty, I’m alone, and I’m going to die." Nothing else really matters.
Whatever he’s spinning in his head—it won't conjure up some miracle escape—be it an island, a boat, or a plane. Thinking your way out of a corner doesn't work like that. It just doesn't.
The fallout from his logic leaves you with two grim possibilities—did he push further and swim harder for more days simply because he kept a positive mindset? Or did he just give up after day one, content to drift aimlessly and wait for the seagulls to pick him clean? 🙂
If there’s truly no land in sight—no passing cargo ships or Coast Guard cutters—then nobody wins. Everyone goes down together. It won't matter if you were a saint or a sinner; the ocean doesn't care about your theology. But if some help shows up on day four or five? The ones who didn't give up are the ones who make it. That survival isn't just luck—it's the direct result of that stubborn faith, that gut feeling that God is going to pull you through.
We don't need to resort to extremes—it’s just not worth the burnout. It might take longer, sure—building a business from the ground up or chasing some other long-term goal isn't exactly a sprint—but there's more value in that slow burn than in crashing and burning early.Once I finally separated thought from reality—and acknowledged that we really have very little control over our own lives—I reached a conclusion. 😉
A rational man accepts his limitations. He understands that there are certain constants—death, disease, the inevitable decline of the body—that simply aren't up for negotiation. Instead of fighting the impossible, he focuses his energy where it actually matters. He uses logic and hard-earned knowledge to improve his quality of life and extend it where he can, focusing strictly on the variables he can actually control. It’s about knowing when to push and when to just accept the hand you've been dealt.
The issue is that we often hit a wall where our knowledge runs dry—so we just accept certain limitations as absolute truths. We get used to the idea that things like death or terminal illness are inevitable, and we stop fighting. We settle for the status quo. But maybe if we kept pushing—even if those actions seemed irrational to the experts—we could actually overcome the disease. Even in modern medicine, you still hear those strange stories about "spontaneous remissions," where a patient’s body somehow defeats an illness on its own through pure biology. To this day, nobody can truly explain how it happens.A believer—someone who accepts facts without needing proof—lacks a clear sense of where their influence ends and reality begins. They carry this misplaced sense that they have more control over the world than they actually do. Because of that delusion, the moment things spiral out of their hands, they try to force a solution through sheer will—whether that’s through blind faith or prayer. Occasionally, their prayers might actually align with what happens next, but let's be honest: it isn't because of the praying. It's just coincidence.
So, what’s your take on that whole "Law of Attraction" thing?
It feels to me like sometimes precisely because we’ve been praying to hit a certain milestone—say, looking for a bit of help—we start noticing things around us that actually pave the way toward that goal.
Prayer—when you factor in visualization and repetition—basically recalibrates your perceptual filters. You start spotting opportunities that were invisible to you before, giving you the opening to actually grab them. In that sense, hitting the target becomes a subtle byproduct of the prayer itself.
In the scenario you described, maybe prayer helps bring the actual issue to light? Sometimes the hardest part of fixing anything is just not knowing where to start or even what the core problem is; you just feel stuck. In those moments, saying "Bog, please help me with X" can actually help identify what that "X" really is.🤷