One major approach to religious fictionalism is to highlight the moral benefits of religious practices, i.e., to argue that even non-doxastic acceptance of the content of religious claims may help practitioners with their moral growth, moral sensibility, moral motivation, and so on (cf. Eshleman 2005; Le Poidevin 2019, 2023; Jay 2014, Leng 2023). In this paper, I argue that this approach fails. Since our worldviews, value systems, and belief systems form an integrated whole in religious practice, it is difficult to isolate moral values (within which moral growth, moral sensibility, and moral motivation are all deeply involved) from this whole. Accordingly, moral benefits seem to be intimately connected with moral and religious belief and cannot be gained separately in religious practices. Instead, I suggest a ritualistic approach. I argue that religious rituals can be beneficial for attaining the meaningfulness of life. As Nozick (1981) argues, meaning consists in transcending limits: being part of God’s plan could be a way of pursuing the meaning of life. While the meaning of life may collapse with the rejection of religious belief, meaningfulness may nevertheless survive through non-doxastic acceptance alone. In this paper, I propose such a novel approach to religious fictionalism.
