So although she does not receive any benefit of believing in God—because she doesn’t—she honestly believes she has deceived herself into believing in God, and so she honestly expects to receive the benefits that she associates with deceiving oneself into believing in God; and that, I suppose, ought to produce much the same placebo effect as actually believing in God. And this may explain why she was motivated to earnestly defend the statement that she believed in God from my skeptical questioning, while never saying “Oh, and by the way, God actually does exist” or even seeming the slightest
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