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Are there any benefits to practicing a belief?

At first glance, yes. Belief allows one to limit the feeling of insecurity.

However, as soon as one studies cognitive dissonance, one understands that the gain in the sense of security is matched by a loss in terms of entrapment, an inability to simply manage problems.

Explanation

Objective facts form a fully coherent whole. A belief system can also be a fully coherent whole. But facts plus a belief system contain contradictions, thus generating cognitive dissonance, inevitably leading to self-deception, an inability to simply take facts into account, and therefore suffering for oneself or others.

This is precisely the problem: history shows that in many cases, the practice of a belief brings benefit to the individual at the expense of others. The maneuver of adopting a belief in loving one's neighbor is a noble idea but does not work much better than communism. Only love for facts yields a beneficial outcome, in the form of the ability to simply and rationally solve problems.

Quotations

Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion: « The first step in that direction is already a conquest. It consists in 'humanizing' nature. We cannot face impersonal forces and a fate that remains eternally foreign to us. But if the same passions raging in our own souls are also found in the elements, if death itself is not an inevitable occurrence but an act of violence caused by a malicious will, and if we are surrounded, throughout nature, by beings similar to the humans around us, then we breathe more easily, we feel at home in the supernatural, and we can finally psychologically elaborate on our fear, to which we previously could not find any meaning. We may still be defenseless, but we are no longer paralyzed without hope, we can at least react, perhaps even not truly defenseless: we can indeed use against these violent superhuman beings the same methods we use in our human societies, we can try to appease them, bribe them, and by influencing them, we may rob them of part of their power. This substitution of a natural science with psychology not only gives us immediate relief but also shows us the direction in which to move in order to dominate the situation even better. »

Go deeper

See the complementary question Why is every belief dangerous?

See the question History and overview of psychotherapies, which explains the notion of the placebo effect.

Refer to the questionsWhat is cognitive dissonance?
Why is love for one's neighbor not a solid foundation for living well together?
What should one do to be a good person?

The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud explain the motivation behind beliefs, with the caveat that all of Freud's explanations remain biased by his focus on instinctual drives rather than social ambition.As for the consequences, it may be useful to refer to the work of Krishnamurti, and to read the book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger.