What is that "make believe" feeling inside?

Believing is about trust. What we believe tends to fit into three key categories: People, values and statements or inferences. Which is to say beliefs and faith are an intrinsic part of being human. Moreover, both sides of the atheism/God discussion involve faith. The human life is more than skin and bones. Love, relationships, and even the search for truth and rationality, along with yearning, passion, and imagination all seem to transcend the material in significant ways. Faith in a world of only natural is still faith and/or belief. Faith in only biology, chemistry, and physics is still a form of faith and/or belief.

Belief is not a feeling in the emotional sense. The best way to describe it might be that a belief is like a conclusion about "the way things are" that you accept as accurate without being able to fully verify it's accuracy empirically. There are two kinds of beliefs, which I'll call data-based and faith-based. These beliefs may be further evaluated by an outside party as rational or irrational. Data-based beliefs are your own conclusions about the world that arise from your evaluation of available information when a more direct method of evaluation is not possible. You use your existing knowledge and experience and sources of new information you have deemed to be reliable to form a set of beliefs about the world because you cannot directly experience it all yourself. Not all such beliefs are rational, and not all data is reliable.

Examples of data-based beliefs include: The belief that jaguars are dangerous predators that would not make good pets. The belief that a full moon affects Human behavior and increases emergency room traffic. The belief that you can't succeed. Faith-based beliefs are similar in that they are a combination of your own knowledge and experience and the information from outside sources, but in this case the outside sources provide a conclusion instead of additional information. Your belief is based on accepting that conclusion/interpretation and adopting it; your own experience might heavily inform your belief, or may be too limited to really play a role.

Examples of faith-based beliefs include: Belief in the nature of black holes (unless you're involved in researching them...don't flip out on me, scientists - for most people without a science background, black holes are what you say they are. Not many people are going back to the data to draw their own conclusions). Belief that prayers are heard and answered. Belief that the alignment of stars helps determine your life's path. Belief is faith and conviction without support of factual evidence or logic proof. It's an ideal in metaphysical philosophy (excluding the fields of geometry, logic and mathematics) or religion. And religion is all about feeling, sentiment, emotion, love and passion without rationality. God, Creator, Messiah, equality, individual liberty and freedom, and democracy are the best examples.

Make believe is defined as something that is pretend or that is not real. The definition of make believe is when you pretend that something is true or real even when it is not. An example of make believe is when you say you are a princess, although you really are not. Belief is not a feeling per se. However a person's belief can be a source of contentment, satisfaction, happiness; and looking forward to a better life. In that sense one can say that a sound, well thought out, belief has the potential of bringing a joyful feeling in one's heart.

Feeling is an emotional stance; believing is an intellectual stance. Often he two arise together, but it is perfectly possible to have one without the other. For instance, there are many Christians who believe that premarital sex is immoral, without really feeling it to be true; premarital sex is immoral as a matter of taught doctrine (an intellectual stance) that they are constrained to believe, but it doesn’t strike many people as being particularly significant so long as the people involved are otherwise moral about their behavior (i.e. monogamous, committed, and on their way to marriage). Likewise many people feel that that smoking marijuana is wrong without having any particularly sensible or informed beliefs about the matter; it’s just an unsubstantiated gut feeling.

Feeling doesn't require belief. For me, at least, it is visceral. Love, anger, amazement, disappointment. All feelings that require no belief in anything. Believing, to me, is accepting the conclusions of others more knowledgeable than I am. I am an atheist so do not believe in god. It is simply something that doesn't raise any feelings in me. I do believe in freedom of choice, religion (even though I don't practice it) and justice. These are beliefs that people can have feelings, even passions, about but this is not absolutely required.

Beliefs and feelings are two different events and experiences and should not be confused with one another. For example, you might believe that it’s acceptable for two men or two women to get married but you might feel negative when stimulated by seeing two men or women getting married. There is no necessary cause and effect relationship between beliefs and feelings. Just because you feel X is true or immoral or disgusting, does not mean that you believe X is true or immoral or disgusting and vice versa. Cheers!