After reading books like Karen Armstrong's A History of God, I became curious about the origins of religious longing for the Transcendent and the numinous, and why we tend to believe, or want to believe, in religious ideas. I started with Michael Shermer's books on the subject and then I read several other books. Here are a sampling of the books I read that comes to mind; they are written mostly by atheistic scientists arguing that religion and theistic tendencies is innate in our species:
> Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew B. Newberg, Eugene G. d'Aquili, and Vince Rause
> Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs by Andrew B. Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
> The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God by Matthew Alper
> Did Man Create God?: Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain? by David E. Comings
> The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
> The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
All (or most) of the books above are written by nontheists who do not believe in the supernatural veracity of religious claims; nonetheless they conclude that the science is clear that we evolved a "spiritual brain" if you will. Even the famous atheist Fredrick Nietzsche was "spiritual" (as a recent bio of him by Sue Prideaux argues). For example, as referenced in her book, in In Human All Too Human, section 251 -- The Future of Science, he wrote, "... a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, so to speak, one to feel science and the other to feel non science, which can lie side by side, without confusion, divisible, exclusive; this is a necessity of health."
So all of this led me to question my rejection of any and all religious structure, belief, and ritual. Could all that stuff be healthy for our brain if practiced rationally in moderation? Was I actually ignoring the scientific evidence (offered in the books above) by at least not being a religious humanist? Then two books at the time really pushed me away from secular humanism toward more of a religious humanism. These books were Bruce S. Sheiman's An Atheist Defends Religion, and Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. Both books were written by atheists yet even as atheists they found value in religious ideas and ritual, and it was clear to me that benign non-fundamentalist religion was good for the psyche.
