When one is severely hurting, false comfort can be indistinguishable from real comfort. The illusion of peace can, in extreme need, substitute for real peace.
As great a mind as Martin Gardner followed “Credo Consolans,” “I believe because it makes me feel better.”
To you – and to me! – that’s odious. But I won’t scorn the spirit in need. Religion is the methadone of the masses: it isn’t even a real opiate!
I made up the word. But, then, if all ideas are true…then I made up a true word… Naivism is just the creed of “common sense” and “appearances matter” and “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” The problem is that this doesn’t really work. We’ve looked behind the curtain, and there’s stuff going on there that is violently against common sense. Quantum physics, relativity, evolution, etc.
For more or less the reasons that Der Trihs gives, I can’t agree. I will concede that religious faith can have some personal, individual utility. People may, on their own, hold to such faith because it comforts them. But in terms of making meaningful public decisions, no. Religion and state must be held apart; they are antimatter opposites when it comes to valid purposes.
Grin! Perhaps true, but we have the security of knowing that no one believes in superheroes, and we do not formulate public policy on their basis.
It terrifies me (and nauseates me no little!) that the potential-end-of-the-world decisions made during the Cold War were, in many cases, made by people who believe in an afterlife, in God, in heaven and hell. These moral baboons were willing to put an end to human civilization, because, to them, they get to eat pie in the sky when we (all!) die. I hold this to be just about the most immoral stance conceivable.
At very least, no one is likely to launch nuclear missiles, in the belief that Superman will intercept the warheads and deflect them into deep space.