Atheists seem to assume that people who believe in God and an afterlife are mentally weak and gullible. Thereby assuming intellectual superiority over them.
But have they considered what it means to really believe you are answerable to a higher power in everything you do?
Is it not easier and more comfortable to believe death brings oblivion, than to believe you are held accountable in an eternal afterlife?
I'm not sure what ease or comfort has to do with belief.
Is it easy? Comfortable? For me, what's easy and comfortable is what is compatible with things that I know, as opposed to opinion. Let me explain. I know that gravity is real. If there were a philosophical belief that came along that was incompatible with gravity, then it would not be comfortable to accept that philosophical belief.
On the other hand, I do not know anything about an afterlife, so a philosophical belief about it would not make me inherently uncomfortable. It passes that hurdle, so we're good so far. However, I then look at religious systems that include the belief in the afterlife, and they seem to include a lot of other beliefs that I am certain are false. For an obvious example, I know that the Bible says there is an afterlife, but it also says the Earth was created in seven days. Ok, well, one of those statements can be an allegory. But it also says that Jericho's walls were destroyed by trumpets. Well, you get the idea. Simply put, I find there to be a lot of things I don't buy into about Christianity, so the fact that they say there's a final judgement and an afterlife is no reason to believe it. I get uncomfortable with any religious based afterlife belief, because I know that some of the other elements of associated religious beliefs are not true.
Ok, but could there be an afterlife anyway? Maybe the religions are just imperfect representations of reality, but the idea of afterlife and judgement are so common in so many religions that maybe those common elements still have a factual basis, and there really is a judgement after death. At this point, there are certain things I know about behavior. There are certain sorts of brain injuries, and certain sort of illnesses that alter behavior, and, in simple terms, people who experience those injuries or illnesses become evil. So, I ask myself, would it make sense to judge people based on them having been injured? A lot of people, recognizing this problem, try to insist that God knows the difference between illness and nature, but if that's the case, I certainly don't. It seems to me that the tendency toward good or evil is a combination of factors that influence brain chemistry, and it doesn't make much sense to pass eternal judgement on something based on what his brain did after that brain is no longer in use.
Indeed, the entire concept of good and evil is a bit questionable, when one considers brain chemistry, but in the end I've decided that they are useful concepts, even if they don't have a true, deep, meaning beyond certain evolutionary adaptations that tend to promote the good of genes that are similar to your own.
In short, the idea of oblivion after death is indeed "more comfortable" than the idea of an afterlife, but only because it seems more consistent with reality.
Finally, if I happen to be wrong about that, and there is an entity of consciousness far beyond my understanding that will indeed judge me after my death, I fall back to the Buddhist teaching that says that if God exists, He is so far beyond human comprehension that there is no possibility of understanding anything about Him, including what such a being would find pleasing, so while there may be a final judgement after death, there is no possible way to understand anything about the basis for that judgement, so it should not influence what you do in life.
