Do you see any benefits to religious faith?

[Mudhammam]

It seems to me that false belief is intrinsic to the human condition, in the form of our instinctive motivations.  For example, most of us have the idea that it's good to reproduce.  And the most solid moral social argument you can make, ever, is a hysterical "But the kids!  What about the kiiiiiiiiddddds!?!??!!?"

There's nothing intrinsically important about anything we do, and yet even the philosophers among us continue to act as though there WERE something intrinsically important.  For example, while I think there are far too many people in the world, and especially in Korea, I'd probably run into a burning building to save a child.  Surely, there's an instinctive narrative at play there.

Sure, but I'm sure you'd agree that reading The Odyssey as a great work of fiction, containing pearls of wisdom woven together with mythology and ingenious storytelling, is an intrinsically more useful means of reading it and similar literature, as opposed to treating the blind bard's masterpiece as a divinely inspired piece that should serve as the final word on matters of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical intuition.  And this perspective also happens to be the true manner in which even the most devoted pagans ought to have revered Homer, or Hesiod, or any of their other "prophets" i.e. poets.  Similarly, there are facts about the world that correlate to more prolonged and fulfilling forms of happiness, and these can be discovered through science and philosophy, as can their opposite states (by which I think that running into a burning building to save a child can be shown to entail pros and cons that will affect the reasonings and/or motivations of individuals differently)?  If "intrinsically important" is synonymous with, or in proportion to, "intrinsic value," then I confess that I can conceive of nothing more objectively important, as a human being living amidst creatures both superior and inferior to myself.  My question is, when does utility triumph truth when the two are so obviously wedded together, despite whatever fictions may have served as stepping stones to progress?  Or should we contribute to the perpetuation of delusions that feel useful to certain individuals? How does one weigh the harm with a subject as broad as religion, or simply fantasy?