Do Christians just have faith in God because we need a source of comfort? In an interview for Los Angeles Review of Books, Hollywood screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry addressed those questions:

The single most annoying thing [I hear about faith] … is the kind, patronizing way that nonreligious people have of saying, "You know, sometimes I wish I were religious. I wish I could have that certainty. It just seems so comforting never to doubt things."

Well, sometimes I wish I had the certainty of an atheist … I do not find religion to be comforting in the way that I think nonreligious people mean it …

It is not comforting to know quite as much as I do about how weaselly and weak-willed I am when it comes to being as generous as Jesus demands. Thanks to church, I have a much stronger sense of the sort of person I would like to be, and I am forced to confront all the ways in which I fail, daily. Nothing promotes self-awareness like turning down an opportunity to bring children to visit their incarcerated parents. Or avoiding shifts at the food bank. Or calculating just how much I will put in the collection basket. Thanks to church, I have looked deeply into my own heart and found it to be of merely small-to-medium size. None of this is particularly comforting.