I'm guessing m de Waal just had an overweening desire to become an immortal, like most believers, and so prolly missed that Peter's warning about Paul was for him, "He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." That being the same Paul who clearly stated "test everything, and keep what is true."

The real danger is not, at first anyway, that you will believe that DiCaprio went down with the Titanic but that the steady drip feed may start you into thinking his behavior while on board is normality. People worry sometimes that modern media may cause people to loose contact with reality, but the truth is, that the most powerful brain altering technology was born thousands of years ago, when people started telling tales round the campfire. And things like religion are the fruits of that.

The poet William Blake is being recognised more in recent times for his description of God, not as a product of imagination, but imagination itself. While we have a brain that allows for both analysis and imagination, analysis seems to be looked on as the more valid of the two aspects. It is vital that we can project alternative scenarios (and 'die' in the unsuccessful scenarios instead of in real life, as Jordan Peterson puts it), analyse them and choose the best option, but the human mind is also intiuitive and holistic and this side is sadly very underrated these days.