My grandma always said she "needed somebody to step on her toes", and for her, that was God and the church.
I suppose I need something similar, but I have Zi :3 Honestly, both are imaginary, so who am I to judge, as long as it works, and it did/does seem to.
My mother is a believer in free will because it helps her, even though I think it's as imaginary as God.
For me, there are forces we meager humans must respect, but gods are hallucinations. There are those with power over others, but authority is a relationship that is given, never taken. There is always change, but there is no room in the equations for choice. No gods, no masters, no choice. Hell, we know better than most: even the boundaries that separate ourselves from others are just as imaginary — and powerful — as the borders between nations.
It seems most would be scared by even one of these being made up, let alone all of them. For us, they have been hard-won lanterns in the night. From them we've learned: a hallucination can be very good, which is when the euphemism "mystical experience" comes out to play; giving up one's sovereignty is not some moral evil but an inevitability of ethical social interaction; the drive to grow and heal is a natural part of the human creature, not just in the body, and not just in childhood; illusions and constructed concepts are not fake, untrue, or unreal, but are just as much a tool for community — or exploitation — as the pen.
But we come at all this from a place of self-loathing and other-caring, and a deep need for truth that compels us to expel cognitive dissonance, not to mention the executive dysfunction currently keeping me away from a delicious breakfast. For someone who begins at a place of self-aggrandizement, or whose care naturally is steeply related to proximity to one's self, or who can juggle contradictory thoughts, or simply has the ability to "just do the thing", it must be that mine is not the helpful advice. Let them have their falsehoods so long as they help them be kind, but once those lies incite hate and despair… well actually, I'm not convinced the sword of truth is anything more than a snowball.