Ego-- harmful delusion or pragmatic necessity?

[Mudhammam]

I think it's a pragmatic necessity and only a harmful delusion when employed to the impediment of better alternatives in any given situation. The question of utility could be related to a number of discoveries that have deflated man's position as a demi-god but I'm sure many of these now seem trivial; take, for example, the overthrow of the Ptolemaic model of the Universe or the Mosaic cosmogeny of its origin. Does it matter that the soul cannot be located as a physical substratum anymore than the "the Good" or "the Beautiful" can? Does time cease to play an important role in our lives because we only have something of an experience of movement "in time," and lack any veritable evidence of its existence apart from intuition and events that appear to persist as records of a continuous past? Would it matter from the standpoint of our daily experiences if our common-sense perception of time was rendered nothing but a psychological construct? I kind of feel the same way about the ego, the Good, and other invisible objects of practical import to human life: they may be unsubstantiated by known modes of testability but it's impossible to do without them. It sort of brings to mind a quote of Epicurus in his letter to a certain Menoecus that I recently read:

"It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of destiny which the natural philosophers have imposed. The one holds out some faint hope that we may escape if we honor the gods, while the necessity of the naturalists is deaf to all entreaties."