I think I have "Dillahunty Syndrome"

[Angrboda]

It may help to look at it from a different perspective. Try understand why and how a person is believing in the way they do. Are they insane? Only if you expand the definition of mentally deranged to the point that the concept is useless. They are quite sane in the normal sense. Are they dishonest? Some, perhaps, but most often only in the sense that we all are at times. We confabulate, that's what we do. When faced with a thing that demands an explanation, and an absence of such, the brain kicks in and fixes it for you. And this is only one mechanism. I strongly doubt many, except the few charlatans, are liars in the sense of self-consciously telling people things that they know to be untrue. Are they classically stupid or unintelligent? In general, no more so than anybody else; true, there is a skew, but the overlap of the distribution of intelligence among belief and disbelief is far greater than the disjunction; and we've all met clever apologists. If not liar or lunatic, are they then Lord? Eh, I rather doubt it, and I think we have good reason for disbelieving the veracity of their beliefs.

So what explains why and how they behave as they behave? We all have roughly the same brains, so the difference has to be largely one of different content. And it's not necessarily faulty content either. We all notice the cycle wherein a believer presents some evidence, finds it faulty, and simply returns to the well in hopes of finding a better explanation consistent with her prior belief, or, failing that, simply holds on in hopes of deliverance somewhere down the road. (See perseverance of belief.) But we all do similar things. We know that general relativity and quantum mechanics in their current form cannot be reconciled. Do we just abandon both as obviously wrong in some way? No, we try to preserve the truth by looking for ways to fix the problem.

And there's an even more fundamental question of why religious belief in the first place? It's an adaptationist myth that every feature has to justify itself in terms of function, but the truth remains that religion is ubiquitous. It's kind of like the old saying, paraphrased, "If religion didn't exist we'd have to invent it." And despite enormous variations in form and content, so much so that it's almost impossible to give a single all encompassing definition of what "religion" is, we all seem to know it when we see it. And patchwork explanations like, "religion exists to satisfy our need to explain things" and "religion helps us cope with our mortality" are just that, patchwork; none really holds up under scrutiny or anthropological analysis.

So just why do human brains do what they do in such a way that results in the phenomenon we know as religion? And how do they do it at the individual level?

As H.L. Mencken said, "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong." This applies aptly to 99% of the explanations of why religions exist and why specific religious people think, act, believe, and behave as they do.

That left over 1% is what fascinates me.