Thinking about this a little more, maybe there's also a reverse side to it: many find belief more fun.
Even for the secular it seems like we need some fantasy to airbrush a world that's actually pretty dull. Sports, music, film, art, collecting, drugs, sex, all things to distract from an otherwise not that interesting life. Maybe this speaks to why world religions have done such a great job at surviving, the storytelling is pretty appealing, almost magical.
There's a lot of toxicity involved, but I have to think there's many people who essentially prefer a story to the lack of one.
That's the thing though... You can have the fun and the story without the belief.
I've been doing it as much as possible all my life and things have gotten more fun, not less.
Maybe for many the fun comes from both places, enjoying the fruits of science while also having a pleasant story on the side. Double the benefit.
I'm mainly thinking about the why, not the ought.
Well, I can't say exactly why human brains grow off the
vine umbilical with nodes that are highly compatible with "fairy ideation", and which, when presented stories about fairies, readily empathize those personalities into existence inside themselves.
I've seen a couple people who are properly
Infested with a practical
swarm of fairies, for example.
They're absolutely real things: interactions between nodes of their very human brain and stories that they have heard and tell to others and themselves.
But if you exist as nerves in your head and as nerves in your head have access to the power of reification through action, these things can in fact have real power within that landscape of control over who you are and what you think.
Someone could even potentially sell themselves to such a structure, until who they were once is now equivalent enough to being the subordinate party in an anglerfish relationship (see also:
simp).
Not all these stories are pleasant and fun, after all. Some can be terrifying.
We can call these "neurosis" or "psychosis", but really that fails to capture the full depth of the reality in any useful way as to allow someone to navigate that bizarre battle of wills within their own mind, and the various forms people have tried to discuss across the eons. Really, neurosis describes the character of the "hole" that is being filled in the human mind but it fails to capture the various things that hole can be filled with, sometimes with gnostic intent.
We know that the things we can cram into those cracks in our minds are often recorded of in stories, like DNA sitting in a cell waiting for the protein of the human mind to start transcribing it into new chunks of that selfsame protein's structure.
Even so, this ideation is literally dependent on the aptly named "Tinkerbell principle" with regards to fairies: disbelief, or at least a lack of caring and thus a guaranteed lack of contribution to their activity within the network, causes atrophy and eventual pruning of such systems.
Thinking about this a little more, maybe there's also a reverse side to it: many find belief more fun.
At a funeral the believe can offer statements about the decedent being in a better place etc.
The atheist saying, "When you die you rot won't cut it."
How about "when you die, the enduring pieces of yourself that you have infected others with via the open channel of their freely offered empathy will survive, to be seen and treated as they saw you in life. To some you were a villain. To others you might have been a hero. To many more you were a mere cardboard cutout placed on the street. Some day someone may even tell the stories that allow such empathetic constructs to propagate to someone who has the same core neural structures which originated the wave, and thus cause partial re-instantiations of relationships that were originally unique in you while you lived."
It's all material.
Of course there COULD be some kind of "exit interview", assuming that the universe is a research project, but that's unlikely and unimportant. That other thing I mentioned, the propagation of bits of your (soul?) Through empathy and stories being told? That's quite real, and trivially so.
