There are a lot of things we THINK we need. But sometimes, all it takes is a little paradigm shift in our thinking, adapting a different perspective, to realize it falls away easily and we don't need it all that much after all.
Yowza. That sounds like a tidy clean way of wrapping up the problem, but that is not the lived experience of a
LOT of people.
Don't mistake me, if someone pulls off a faith transition that smooth and at the end of it they feel no real loss, then cool for them. I'd probably want to guide that person into humanism to avoid derailing into some kind of moral nihilism, but yeah whatever floats their boat.
The very real, tangible problem is that most faith transitions (either into another faith or into atheism) are rarely that simple, painless, or easy. And frequently people end up in atheism or agnosticism in a sort of spiritual identity fugue that doesn't ever subside. I say this both from personal experience and from observing the experiences of others. My need for spirituality and a responsible epistemology to guide it aren't stemming from a nice, clean break into agnosticism from Christianity. After seven years of trying to recohere from a faith deconstruction, I've had enough of the malaise. I'm not alone.
Also, faith transitions don't happen in a vacuum. Frequently, people in faith have a
lot to lose by abandoning their religious practice: career, community, friends, family. Faith can certainly cause problems, but your prescription for its complete abandonment is totally inadequate for addressing all of the symptoms of the condition. A nice, easy transition from theism to atheism is just not in the cards for many religious people, no matter how much you (or they!) want it to be. If you are a humanist concerned with the elevation of society, you are morally obligated to take the well-being of these people into account.
This idea of a "need to believe" and "ultimate truth" as an inevitable part of human nature may just be a weird byproduct of certain traditional cultural paradigms and ways of thinking we have grown up with.
Science says there's a lot more driving the need for certainty, spirituality and ultimate truth than just cultural traditions. I agree with Richard Dawkins on that much.
But humanity has reached a stage where that is no longer compatible with more useful ways of thinking we have learned just in the past 2-3 centuries. So it may be time to revisit the earlier ways of looking at things and seeing if it was even the right way to look at things in the first place. It seems what you are describing here is just the discomfort, the cognitive dissonance, that comes from adapting more modern and useful ways of looking at the world, and finding that they are hard to reconcile with many of the old paradigms and worldviews. You are thinking there MUST be some way to reconcile these two. The inability to do so is making you uncomfortable. You want to salvage the old model in some way or other. You are using the perspectives and vocabulary of the new paradigms to look at the old ones, and they no longer make sense. But you feel like you need it, and wouldn't be able to live without them. You really don't. It's like the smoker who thinks he can't live without his cigarettes. Psychologists often use "cognitive behavioral therapy" (CPT) to show them that with being able to think about things slightly differently, you don't find necessarily clever new ways to fill that inevitable "need". You may find you don't need it at all.
I've been thinking a lot about how to respond to this. I am beginning to wonder if this evangelical streak in the New Atheist isn't really just the same sort of fundamentalism that plagues religion.
My first rebuttal is to ask you these:
Do humans need art?
Do they need music?
Do they need love?
And who decides how real or imagined those needs are?
My second rebuttal is to point out your (and other atheists') severe error in making religion analogous to an addictive substance. The benefits of a cigarette is so utterly outweighed by its costs that guiding people away from them is a pretty healthy thing to do. Science has a lot to say about the neurological benefits of religion though, and they're hard to beat any other way. So you're not asking someone to let go of their need for a smoke: it's more like you're asking someone to let go of their need to be in a loving relationship.
"But relationships are so dysfunctional," you argue. "And yours is abusive. You don't
actually need a relationship, you just
want a relationship. Plus they're so prone to failure, why make the effort? It's an imagined desire. You'll be happier alone, you'll see."
Maybe that individual's 'relationship'
is abusive, but is the fairest and kindest course of action really to sever the hand to heal the broken finger?
