Actually, I would counter your proposition regarding "superiority" as an invention, with more general "self-delusion" as being the most important, fundamental human invention. Human society could be argued as a form of mass, collective delusion, in which the immaterial becomes material.
The concept of money, for instance, is a prime example of this collective human delusion. The value of money derives from man's belief (or faith) in the legitimacy of the medium upon which his society chose to assign certain object as the medium of exchange. The only value of "money" derives from belief (or faith).
Mathematics is another form of delusion accepted as "true" on the will if faith alone. Reality does not divide itself into mathematical equations; the human mind imposes mathematical rules upon reality, by dividing the external world into comprehenaible divisions. An honest mathematician will recognize that his career is simply an engagement with fictitious universe of man's imagination.
Faith may be the ultimate "invention" of humanity that materializes the creature we consider "human." Without faith, man ultimately is reduced to a bag of self-replicating chemicals with equal value to the mud upon which he tramples.
True. The ingeniousness of the invention (or just the thought experiment) is that if you delude yourself, you get confused. What's real? What's not? But if you lay all other delusions aside, exchanging it for the one single delusion of superiority - you may even proud yourself on being a superior human being because you are delusion-free - then, problem solved! You can get very far by exchanging all delusions for the one of superiority (which, like I say in the post, may not be a delusion at all). If you read philosophers or even scientists of the past, let's say anthropologists of the past, how lowly they spoke of indigenous peoples compared to PC anthropologists of today, if you read Schopenhauer or Nietzsche and see how "pompously" (but completely justifiably, in my opinion) they wrote about themselves, then you'll easily understand how this invention can be very handy. "For every two pages of truth, I'll write a sentence complimenting myself on its discovery." That's a pretty good deal, especially considering that no one is forced to acknowledge their superiority, or pay them any money, so there's a lot more left to spend on inane entertainment that will make people like Bieber and Beckham filthy rich, cos knowledge-seekers are self-fueling. (Maybe - maybe they should organize a strike?)
True. Many a times a theist will say to me, "but we believe in all sorts of things, why pick on God specifically?", and I often reply saying that the God delusion is harmful because it's shared. A bunch of crazy people, each with their own delusion, won't do much harm. But here you give an example of a shared delusion that does actually produce harm, because it's a mass delusion. (You don't have to agree with my atheism btw to agree that delusions are mainly harmful when they are shared).
This is more complicated than your other points. Mathematics may indeed not be a truth with a capital T because it imposes a fixed structure on a fluid world. Same can be said of many of our language concepts. But this specific "delusion" can be mapped onto reality with high statistical accuracy and lead to beneficial practical results. It's how engineers even today use Newton's equations even though they've been replaced by Einstein's, because Newton's math is simpler and it does the job equally well.
I see what you're saying. William James had a lot to say about the value of faith, and if you haven't studied him I think you'd like him. 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. 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.
I'll also just add that the post is a kind of thought-experiment, a "what if", an interesting idea, rather than a historical claim about what actually happened. Like I said, a just-so story.
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.
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?