As If

Hans Vaihinger via Ramesh Balsekar ... "Man has no choice but to live by fictions. He must act as if there is a god to reward virtuous conduct and punish the iniquitous conduct; as if the illusory world of the senses was reality; as if he had a free will which made him responsible for his actions; as if humanity was not under sentence of death. It is only by virtue of these fictions that the individual can keep his sanity."