Why is it ok for people to believe in some fake things and not others?

[moriah]

148. Honey, I have to agree with them on this part...

... that people who reject all forms of faith/spirituality for others are making the same mistake as those who want to force their faith on others.

For example, can you really say the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) have been a force for harm?

The Friends' historic commitment to caring for civilian victims on all sides of a war/conflict, including their Service Committees feeding programs in post-WWI Germany, allowed them to continue to aid people in danger of persecution under Hitler's regime not being helped by other organizations (the need was so great that's where they decided to focus, primarily non-religious Jews or people who had Jewish ancestry enough to be in danger but not "Jewish" as defined matrilineally) up until they conquered all of France. Had US and British Friends sponsor total strangers in order to get past immigration issues.

Now, the AFSC is in hot water with Israel for advocating individual peaceful economic protest against companies aiding the Israel/Palestine conflict. But they've stood by what their faith tells them is right -- not aiding war or occupations, and equal treatment for all people because, in their view, every human being ever born has the same innate connection to God.

I get that religion is often misused, and the Friends were certainly not considered mainstream when they originated and aren't representative of Christianity as a whole now, particularly very different in almost every ideology from evangelical fundamentalists.. And meetings for worship are nothing like "church" church. But the original question was essentially "If it doesn't hurt anyone else and gets the person through the night, what's the problem?"

People who want to force faith on others are hurting people because usually they aren't just happy with faith in something (deism essentially, that God exists but is irrelevant to living a good/moral life), but faith in their specific brand and finding it very relevant to obey their brand of morality.

But people who want to say absolutely no faith is "okay", regardless of whether that faith or that person's way of practicing it is kept in the private sphere and not forced unwillingly on others/causing harm (beyond the harm perceived in "adovating belief in anything that can't be scientifically proven as a good thing" at least) to children/vulnerable people by adherence to its tenets...

They're forgetting what made humanity create all the different gods in mythology, myth itself -- that there are still unknown things, and still things we have no control over, and some people take comfort in an explanation for "why shit happens".

For others, they take comfort in the idea that there ISN'T a reason for bad shit happening.

I'm not going to deny that basic comfort to either group.