Thanks. We're vulnerable to cons or to convenient fictions in many areas of life, I think. I'll be writing something soon on how politics and salesmanship reduce to lying. And our very brains con us into trusting simplified perceptions of reality. It might even be easier to explain the persistence of deceptions than the possibility of truth.

In any case, I suspect that religious cons work only because they exploit more fundamental cons and tricks. That was Daniel Dennett's point in Breaking the Spell, about the intentional stance.