Do you wish there's a god?

[Belacqua]

The problem is that beauty does not equal truth.  

Well, Plato and the more Platonic Christians have interesting ideas about how truth and beauty are related. It requires us to think of beauty as something more than prettiness. But again, these are ideas I find it wonderful to hold in the mind and not necessarily argue that they are true in the way that a science textbook is supposed to be true.

I have read a lot of art history and appreciate the talents of great painters, even though I simultaneously acknowledge they also acted as religious propagandists.

Van Eyck, Brueghel, Rembrandt, and some others, made some of the most profound and wonderful objects ever created by human beings. They did so entirely through the structure of their religion. To do it, they had to be amazingly integrated people, with the heart, the mind, the eye, the hand, the will, the daily routine, all working together and not, as with most of us, at odds or neurotically. This alone is a model for how human beings could be. This is more than a talent for making things look good, and to call such works "propaganda" is, let's say... a bit reductive. 

Have you never learned something important from fiction? Again, Dante, Goethe's Faust, Blake's poetry. There are true and important things there. It takes years of work (enormously pleasurable hard work) to open oneself up to these things. We give up easy pleasures because the difficult pleasures are so much more rewarding -- Eros pulls upwards.