Is Everyone Delusional?
The Truth about the universe and ourselves
What is reality and how do we know it?
For some the answer is simple: our senses tell us all there is to know about the world we inhabit, and we act accordingly. But sometimes our perceptions deceive us. Things are not always the way they appear. Mirages, for example, camouflage or magic tricks. Or internet scams. We can be fooled.
Sometimes we fool ourselves because reality is too hard to accept. How much easier it is to embrace a comfortable worldview than it is to see things as they really are. That is why the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud dismissed all religion as delusional, arising from what we want the world to be, not what it is. Regarding the psychical origins of religion, he said:
They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.
Well then… how are we to know what is real?
Truth of Another Kind
Like so many thinkers past and present, Freud rejected religious belief and turned instead to rational thought. Reason is the process of logically thinking things through, rationalists say, and that is how we can know the world.
