Bedtime Stories Children love bedtime stories. The better the story, i.e. the better they're lied to, the better they liked it. Little girls don't want to hear stories about reality and daily life. They want to hear about castles in the sky, knights in shining armor, and growing up to become a princess. We would consider a man to be a cruel father who every evening lulled his little girls to sleep with stories of gore from the evening news. And have you ever tried changing an old story? Kids get upset! They want to hear the SAME lies- even a thousand times. They already KNOW the ending, they maybe even have all the words memorized. Doesn't matter. They enjoy the very process of hearing the same comforting lies, having the same ending, over and over. They like their stories, and they like their stories based on fiction, not fact. Hollywood In Hollywood, which is half an hour up the freeway from me, it's called "the willing suspension of disbelief". An audience can get very pissed, in fact, if a movie screws up the art of lying and breaks their "willing suspension of disbelief". Picture yourself being in a movie theater watching Russell Crowe in "Gladiator", all caught up in the moment, imagining yourself back in ancient Rome, and there in the movie, in the sky behind gladiators battling it out, you see a jet flying in the distance. You've just lost the moment. You have been rudely reminded that it's "just a movie" (which, intellectually, you knew all along), but you are pissed off anyway because you WANTED the movie to lie to you, and it failed you. You feel cheated because you weren't "cheated" out of reality enough. Reality is what you came here to escape from. Drinking Escaping from reality is also a chief motivation of why people drink and do drugs. The stark reality of daily life drives many to drink, and in an alcoholic stupor the world can look to be a kinder and gentler place. Often at bars, men drink to gain the courage to meet women, and women drink to gain the courage to go to bed with the men they meet. For millions and millions of humans, the pain and suffering of addiction is a small price to pay for the privilege of living in a mental fantasy. As seen in the movie "The Matrix", given the choice, some people would rather live happily in a lie- even if they KNOW it's a lie, rather than live sadly in the truth. Compliments Comforting lies also can come in the form of a compliment. Compliments, even false ones, make us feel better. That's just how we are psychologically. Someone at work or school says something nice, and even if false, our day has been brightened. When a wife asks a husband "does this dress make me look fat?", she doesn't want a detailed pound for pound cold-hearted assessment of her ass. What she is fishing for is a compliment, and the correct answer the husband better come up with is "No, of course not honey." [Tom Lykis, radio talk show host and Atheist, puts it this way: It's not the dress that makes you look fat; it's the fat. Not surprisingly, Tom has also been married 4 times!] Self Esteem Self esteem gurus know the value of lying to oneself. If someone who feels he "can't do it" says to himself a thousand times "I CAN do it!", presto-chango, he now feels like he really CAN do it! And who knows, with the newly gained self-confidence, maybe he really can do it now.
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The Biggest Truth I say all of the above, in order to say this: mankind is often dragged kicking and screaming to the truth. It's not something we have a natural attraction for. The biggest truth all of us face is that we who are alive and reading this today will all be dead within 150 years at the most. This is a fact, yet for our own mental health we don't dwell on it. The Biggest Lie The biggest lie that mankind has come up with, in order to counter the biggest truth, is religion. The lie that the dead really aren't dead, that death is just a door we pass thru, permeates mankind. And given how, as a species, we love our lies, it's unlikely that Atheism is going to win the hearts and minds of mankind anytime soon. The fact that we will die, become worm food, is more than the average human can stand. The average human needs the drug of religion to make daily life bearable.
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