Originally Posted by MattMVS7

I’m an atheist with the mentality of a religious person who seeks self-enlightenment and even though a positive perspective can be achieved through atheism, some people are better off with their positive perception of religion. Atheism recognizes the reality of situations (in this case, there being no God and no afterlife). Even though it is good to recognize the reality of a situation in most cases, this is not always the case. In situations where not recognizing the reality of a situation does no harm to you or anyone else and brings you personal pleasure, then recognizing the reality of the situation is pointless. In other words, since believing in God and such would do me no harm and wouldn’t make me harm others and would bring me personal pleasure in life, it would be pointless for me to be an atheist that I am now.

I am going to add something here for people who think that atheism has more value than any amount of pleasure through religious belief (even perhaps the greatest amount of pleasure a human being can have through belief in religion). No amount of intelligence or great things we do in life will ever make up for a lack of pleasure because in order to have such value towards these things is to have pleasure in the first place (as pleasure is what allows us to give value in terms of emotion towards these things). So it would be illogical to say that these things have greater value than our pleasure. Now if you were to somehow have value towards something with no pleasure, then this value would be nothing as it is nothing more than a thought. Pleasure is what gives any notion of value life and without pleasure, it would be completely dead. Therefore, pleasure is the only thing that matters and any notion of value is just a thought and nothing more. It is the processes in our own brains that give these things value. Without such a process (which would be the process of experiencing pleasure in the brain), then they will have no value.