I would say that we indeed believe in a lot of falsehoods to get us through the day, but some falsehoods have outlived their usefulness.
How true a statement! Many medical professionals view PTSD as combat related trauma, but fail to consider that the dysfunction of the decommissioned soldier may be more due to his inability to adapt to the civilian societal delusions. Modern Western man lives in a bubble of self-assured security and safety, never considering that the edifice of mass delusion upon which he has built his life is as tenuous as the shifting sand at the beach. The combat veterans, having experienced the ease with which a society degenerates into chaos, recognizes the farce upon which their "civilian" life is to be built. This mental rejection of societal delusion is labeled as "mental illness" and tranquilizers are used to silence non-conformers, lest the entire edifice of social organization falls apart. War and peace are separated by but a camera angle of the mass media. Plato may have been one of the first intellectuals to rebel against this mass delusion we call "society" by elucidating his observation that polis is built upon a Noble Lie.
We should endeavor to believe in as many truths as we can, and as few lies as we can, while at the same time evolving ourselves (with the aid of technology, most probably) to make ourselves into the kinds of beings that can handle truths without imploding.
Perhaps the conceptual matrix that enable man to believe that he can discover truth itself is a delusion. The famous philosophical debate between Bohr and Heisenberg regarding the limits of discovery seems apt here. Is Bohr correct in his faith that man will eventually know all aspects of his external environment with improved tools, or is Heisenberg correct in his faith that there are limits to discovery? At the core of this "scientific" debate lies personal faith in his belief of the universe - religion - regarding its nature.
"Theists" or "atheists" are mislabels and does not serve to identify core values each hold. Are "atheists" merely against theism, or do they hold some other coherent belief system? Do all "theists" share the same belief system regarding the nature of the universe? In the end, all men follow their reason, experience, and revelations from God (or universe, if you will) and leap unto their conclusions, which they term "religion" or "philosophy."
How true, and how well you put it! Soldiers have glimpsed the truth among the Morlocks, and now they return to a world of carefree happy-go-lucky Eloi. As I'll put it later in this series, the soldiers saw that their values are contingently supported by the world, not necessarily. The civilians still live in a delusion of pampered contingent affirmation of their values that they interpret as necessity, as though their values were one with some imagined inviolable "moral fabric" of the universe.
I guess we'll find out! And if any of them is right, we'll have at least one objective truth!
Yeah they all come in different shapes and sizes and flavors, atheists and agnostics and theists too. When I refer to God or religion I usually just mean the traditional conception. If you ask most Christian believers, "is God omnipotent/omnibenevolent/all-knowing/creator of all?" etc., usually you'll get the same answers. I doubt you'll find many who'll say "well, ya know, if you try really hard at school, there's no reason you can't know more than God", or "He's strong, don't get me wrong, but have you seen the muscles on that guy? I bet he could take on God real easy". Etc. People like to be subjectivists about this sometimes, but I believe some core traits of God are agreed on by most believers.
Nature of God has been in debate not only between Christian and non-Christian, but also intra-Christian factions. From the beginning of the Christian sect, they divided themselves between the "Judiazers" and "Hellenizers" relating to the nature of their Messiah. Then the infinite variations of Christianity follows: Arians vs. Niceans, Nestorian vs Ephisian, Coptic vs. Chalcedonian, Catholic vs. Orthodox. The division between Western and Eastern Christianity must also be mentioned, with the West's penchant for legalistic doctrines vs. East's penchant for revelatory dogmas.
Of course, the so-called Reformation unleashed infinite factions baying for each others' blood over the nature of their one god - lower Protestantism can't be termed triune god worshippers as their theology is but a garbage dump of rejected ideas. I don't know much about the Old World, but here in the US, many "Christians" believe that Jesus was a 'Murican who established his church in Texas and gave us the King James' Bible.
And isn't all that a kind of (maybe weak) argument against God's existence, seeing how it's rather obvious from all this that it's men creating God rather than the other way around?
:-). I like the way you challenge theists to refine their world-view. What is the nature of man? As with the nature of God, it seems that the definition regarding the nature of man also has infinite variations. Some, our "he shall not be named" (maybe anomen?), posit that man is just a meat-bag of chemicals, dancing to the drumbeat of instinct; others, like Dawkins, believe that man is a meat-bag of chemicals, gifted with the ability to transcend his instinct; others, like Plato, thought that man is amalgamation of meat and soul, and the soul defines man; Descartes considered that the nature of man is circumscribed to only his thoughts, as nothing in reality is certain. Do all these varied perspectives regarding the nature of man negate that man has a nature, or is man also but an illusion?