Your statement that truth has no value is not true. But, according to your own post, I don't suppose you really care much whether it is true or not.

Lies definitely have negative value. You sound like one of those post-modernist crazies who can justify any evil by lying about it.

To be honest, and I am sure there are many that will refute this, that is the most sensible post I have seen here for some time.

You do seem to have cut the ground from under your own feet, Matias. Why should anyone take your proposition - 'Truth as such has no value in itself' - if you announce that you are prepared to say any old thing at all, if it gives you pleasant feelings? That doesn't sound like a 'rational reason' for accepting your proposition.

It is true that natural selection optimizes for survival, not enjoyment. In that sense, natural selection doesn't "care" about truth.

But humans can, sometimes do, and always should rise above that. We should, at this point in our evolutionary development, be becoming about something more than survival.

By your logic, one can also say that kindness, empathy, equanimity, integrity, and a whole lot of other things are "overrated", too.

As to the notion that people should partake of religion if it gives them pleasant feelings, I would no more make an unqualified recommendation in that regard than I would concerning recreational drugs or joining the local pickleball league. I mean, in principle you gotta do what you gotta do to get through your days, provided it is in your long term rational self interest and that of your loved ones and of society in general. When it comes to deliberately embracing "some anodyne story" I tend to feel that is fine so long as you (1) known you're doing it, (2) don't feel it's binding on others and (3) don't try to impose it on others, including by attempting to influence public policy with those "anodyne" arguments. That, coincidentally, describes the sort of religious person I have no real malfunction with, BTW.

Truth and falsity, beyond logic seems (to me) to be about power as an ideologically force (hence political). The form of governance or collectivity (tyranny, democracy, kingship or whatever) shapes our interpretation and our understanding of our context and situation. What is considered true or false,for the whole are the paradigmatic keys that form the basis of our understanding historical, current and future events.

Some religious beliefs are downright false, while others contain truth. The most inspiring religious ideas for me come from intuitive insights that can not be proven either true or false. Besides that, there are personal emotions such a reverence and awe for which the concept of true vs. false has no applicability.

The very concept of true vs. false is not all that profound IMO. It arises only in connection with communication such as language. That kind of truth is not absolute, but is relative to context. An assertion can be both true and false, as well as meaningless and meaningful. It can be both provable and unprovable. It all depends on definitions and assumptions.

We are very busy trying to absorb incoming sensory data, and through layer after layer of data compression, labeling, and icon creation we each create our private reality. Is it any surprise that we disagree so often about what’s what?

I plan to stay out of the business of religious people.

We need knowledge to act wisely in the world! Global warming shouts loudly that this is so! Religion offers no help here! We do not need an opium of the masses to face this crisis!

This is plenty rational, but I’m not sure how true it is.