Belief in a time of saneness

"To the student, a plea for philosophy" - First year philosophy preface

To disabuse a person of a belief is a an act of violence. It is a violation of the soul, a rape of the heart. However stupid, bigoted, irrational or illogical that belief is does not matter. To destroy belief is to destroy a part of a being.
Sometimes that violence is appropriate and necessary. Paul, the apostle, said "... when I became a man, I put away childish things..." (1 Corinthians 13:11) What he really meant was "my mother explained that fairies weren't real (on this planet in this universe)" or, possibly, "my daddy told me what he had to do to mommy to get me." We hope that when we can do this violence gently and with compassion, tearing the plaster of protection from the wounds of reality with the minimum pain. Of course we all know that the best way to do this is by allowing the patient to remove the plaster themselves. More on that later, maybe.

It would be useful here to discern between true beliefs and meta-belief or, as Mark Twain called the latter, "believing what you know ain't so." We all profess beliefs that are really the funereal suits of social cohesion. It may be a meta-belief in honesty, or the equality of all men and women, etc, etc, etc, ad nausium. Modernity has equipped us with a full wardrobe of these fripperies. We can dismiss them easily and walk through the rest of this narrative intellectually naked.

I am talking about true belief, embedded belief. The kind of belief that makes us inviolable to a world of counter-factuals .Our belief in rightness and wrongness, in the sanctity of hard work Your belief in an omniscient and omnipotent G-d. A belief in a cause or country. Belief in ourselves. In  short, the beliefs, the truths, that raise us up and press us down in a visceral way.

They are all bullshit too, obviously, but we must believe them. Not to do so would be to walk the short urban garden path to insanity.
Therein lies the paradox. How does one, knowing the true arbitrary nature of existence, construct something on which to believe? How does one proceed through life without destroying the beliefs of others while still living an honest existence? No. That is too complex. How does one exist with any meaning?

Shall we trust in the cult of science? Can 1 in 1000 the putative readers reliably identify (without Google) to the nearest 1000 TeV what energy the Higgs-boson was discovered at? Or what it is? Can you explain what science has done to eliminate the trade in women in Western Africa? Can the reader kindly define euclidean geometry and why the two additions (an negative sign for time and sqrt -1) make it useful for general relativity?
Can anyone explain why that last paragraph was inane trickery?

If you cannot answer at least one of these questions and still believe in science, your faith is as childlike as Carthaginian faith in child sacrifice.

Can the engineers tell us what they have done while humane civilization burns? Those mechanical men (and a few women) with their mega-brains are MIA.

Can anyone give this correspondent something on which to believe?

And now for something completely (in)different.
The successful therapist is the consummate seductress. She will cut away the clothing of your soul, inch by inch. All you will experience is the malleable comfort of the session room until the moment you stand spiritually naked in front of the existential mirror. And then you will do it again. It is not enough to see the corpse of psyche. You will dig down until you find the skeleton. Then you will shred it and suck on the very marrow of your existence. And, having fed to satiety, you will do it again.
And again.
We used to call them priests. Shamans, druids, sangomas.
We used to trust them.