Question for those actually religious

Why? Not even trying to be argumentative. Have nothing against religion as a whole but I don't see any thorough case for it thats standing to serious scrutiny.

Why not?

Lets just take Christianity for example.

Biblical literalism is untenable for obvious reasons, but even if you take the interpretive method of the Orthodox and Catholics it still paints a negative picture of God. It shows a God that doesn't care too much about the integrity of his testament to man. The text is written by various different authors with different ideas about God, Satan, etc.

Him remaining silence for the vast majority of human history only to leave his first testament to an obscure tribe makes little sense. Neither does having a second universal testament that takes thousands of years to reach most of the globe.

Not to mention that modern scholarships paints the Bible as subject to contradictions, influences from other mythologies, etc just like any other religious text. Not to say the Bible is not unique in any way and doesn't contain some merit, but it does not strike the objective eye as something inspired from something otherworldly

Either you're a fundamentalist/literalist and you go full retard, or you're some eclectic cathodox type that still paints a puzzling picture more easily explained by it being full of shit than it coming from god, or you're some liberal moderately religious person that has left behind most of it.

Because society has become gradually more miserable since the idea that life is pointless and that we should just seek pleasure in the here and now.

I don't care if there's an afterlife or even a God that cares about us (though I faith in at least the latter), religion helps me get up and go to a job I hate and deal with the other shit life throws at us on a daily basis.

But why not? If he isn't real then I lose nothing; If he is then I benefit

Life is really scary. religion not only offers a set of beliefs that justify it, but a sense of community, with other people who believe what you do.

Funerals are the best example of this: who wants to be told your parent is dead and gone when you could be told they are just waiting for you with everyone else you loved?

Liberal Catholic here, I'll try to explain why I chose to adopt a metaphorical interpretation of the scriptures.

>Biblical literalism is untenable for obvious reasons
Sure, but atheists have no answer for the Anthropic principle. Why is it that our universe seems finely tuned for life, and if you were to adjust any of the physical parameters, even in the tiniest amount, our universe ceases to exist?

Atheists have no answer for this, they have no answer for why the laws of physics are the way they are, and it's worth remembering that the "Big Bang" was a term invented by an atheist named Fred Hoyle as an attempt to ridicule the idea that time and the universe began as a single moment of creation, until the evidence became so compelling that even they were forced to admit that the Big Bang actually happened. Their later belief in a multiverse has no direct evidence supporting its existence. In fact, the math done to justify the plausibility of a multiverse has also proved that the multiverse itself would need a moment of creation, so not only does the existence (or lack thereof) of a multiverse neither prove or disprove the existence of God, all the atheists did was kick the can down the road without addressing the fact that we live in a universe which seems purpose built for us. it's not too big or too small, it's exactly the right size it needs to be, and could never be anything else.

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>It shows a God that doesn't care too much about the integrity of his testament to man. The text is written by various different authors with different ideas about God, Satan, etc.
Or that it shows God's evolving message to humanity as their society and circumstances change. For example, circumcision was a good idea when everybody was a nomadic goat herder without access to decent sanitation, but by Paul's time public bath-houses had made it so that even a poorfag could wash the shit out of his dick and not die from infection. Hardcore religious folks were clinging to circumcision because it was their tradition, but in Galatians Paul compares Mosaic law to a yoke of slavery which was no longer necessary for people to bear. The power of faith is the power to reform society from the person up. In his core, Jesus was a great reformer, who taught a radical new way of conceptualizing one's place in society

Ultimately Christianity was a type of social reformation that was only made possible by Pax Romana. Once missionaries could go town to town not having to worry about being butchered as a heretic by the local religious status quo or fed to lions by the government, that religion rapidly spread across the Empire and fundamentally changed the way that people examine their relationships with their fellow humans. We are currently living in a similar spiritual winter time, most ideas about spirituality, which had grown into a colorful autumn mosaic in the early modern era, are now in the process of withering and dying, but the few which survive the winter will rapidly expand once spring returns, and people have fundamentally reconsidered the way that they chose to structure society. Religion is not dying it is molting, having grown too large for its own skin.

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>Him remaining silence for the vast majority of human history
He was only silent because we didn't have words to describe or comprehend him. As society grows more Godly over time (not in the literal sense of more people going to church, but in a exoteric sense of people not being cruel dicks to each other like they were in the iron-age) a more complex array of human behavior can evolve, and with that evolving complexity, new values need to be written on new tablets while old ideas are condensed into their most useful essences. Jesus's point was not to say that the 10 commandments were wrong, but that you don't need 10 commandments telling people what not to do when you have 1 really good commandment telling people what they should be doing. Neighbors who love each other don't need to be told not to murder, steal, or covet each other's wives.

>Neither does having a second universal testament that takes thousands of years to reach most of the globe.
Taking an interpretive view of the scriptures is recognizing the possibility that the divine reveals itself to people in a language that they understand, and that God favors the interchange of ideas over time. In this way, we can freely study both science and world religions simultaneously without having our sense of faith threatened, because we weigh on two hands. One that there is useful wisdom to be found from studying religion, the other is that scripture written for us resonates most deeply for us. Jesus taught in parables: and in our core as westerners who grew up speaking and thinking in English, a story like the parable of the prodigal son speaks to something deep inside of all of us as a spiritually satisfying story. A story well told is a story that people talk about, and something that can alter behavior. The truth or untruth of the Bible is besides the point, the point is that correctly* applying these stories can make you a happier, more productive and more well rounded person.
>* = keyword.

I'm a Christian and I say fuck Pascal's Wager