The religious need is only met when you no longer need it.
If you want or need religious belief you cannot have the liberated religious life. If you lack belief you do not want or need the liberated religious life. The liberated religious life can only be had by those who think that because they neither need nor want belief they are disqualified from living the liberated religious life. A person can choose the religious path as long as that person does not need belief. When you give a reason for having belief, you are expressing a need to have belief. If you need to have belief, you have to have belief, because it is a requirement. The second you express your need for belief, the liberated religious life becomes impossible. If you do not hold a religious belief, you do not need it and therefore, cannot be persuaded to choose it. If you are persuaded that you need it, then what you have been persuaded you need, is not the liberated religious life. Any reason that persuades you is a reason that leads to the idolatry of the belief paradigm.
Once again, I am curious what you mean by belief. Do you also spell this out in your book? My concern is whether or not you are setting up straw arguments, as it were. Or are you working out your own struggles against your Southern Baptist upbringing? In which case, that provides a context and set of definitions that I can understand to be in play here.
Hey Craig. These are just teasers and this paragraph should make more sense within the book. I spell out belief pretty clearly. The enlightenment issue is very generic and in the context of the book, it could probably be defined in anyway the reader wishes to define it. I wanted to stay away from traditional Christian concepts like salvation or sanctification and chose enlightenment in the most generic non Buddhist way imaginable because it does describe the kind of awareness that I think religious life can bring.