I'm not talking about your motivations. What I said is that your condescending remark about the pub "expresses" "the science culture's contempt for philosophy." My last comment was about that larger culture, not about you. I'm not interested in your motivations.

But once again your condescension is impossible to ignore. Thanks for the "tips," but if I may return the favour, if you're being accused of aligning yourself with a condescending culture of scientism, and you deny that there's any such alignment, you might want to steer clear of being so overtly condescending as to explicitly offer someone tips on how to have a helpful discussion.

You just need to read more carefully so you don't go after red herrings. You're saying that that's what I need to do, but I think it's the pot calling the kettle black. I was trying to understand what you were saying, and what I found were these annoying hints of self-defeating scientism or prejudice against philosophy. Just saying you're not guilty of any such thing doesn't take us that far, does it? It's hard to know ourselves.

This is all the more ironic because there's no chance your worldview is coherent, so you have no business writing with condescension. You're trying to apply psychology to Christian living. So have you reckoned with the fundamental incompatibility between science's methodological naturalism, and the anachronisms of Christianity?

Or look at the limited role you assign philosophy: to act as "a useful tool for informing my empirical research." You have it backwards. Science should inform philosophy by providing us with data. What you need philosophy for is to recognize your latent scientism, and to attempt to reconcile the wildly incompatible sides of your worldview, your scientific practice or interests and your religion.

You don't think it's obvious that delusions can make us happy? What about the typical consumer's delusion that human progress isn't destroying the planet? What about our tendency to ignore the ecological damage we're doing, with our pollution, overpopulation, meat-eating, and capitalistic growth? We ignore all of that by distracting ourselves with vapid entertainments, workaholism, opioids, and so on. How is that culture of consumerism not rife with delusion, despite its conventionality?

But you say this hypothesis currently doesn't "appear to reflect the data." What you mean is that it doesn't show up on the radar of psychiatrists or in their technical formulations of "mental disorder," for the reason I stated: they define disorder as being relative to a society, so they don't evaluate whole societies. Societies are healthy by definition, or they can be neither healthy nor disordered, according to mainstream psychiatrists.

As I said, that has no bearing on whether consumerism or theistic religion is palpably delusional in the ordinary English sense of being based on "a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact," as the dictionary puts it.