Human consciousness is still very immature. We appear to have a psychological need to deceive ourselves. We pretend to have answers about the most fundamental issues - the nature of reality - when we have only more questions. We emotionally depend on such delusions. Obvious examples are the virulent religious antagonisms fueling 21st century terrorism and the disruptive divergences, often leading to violence, in most societies. Wealthy elites and sectarian cults have gone beyond traditional class barriers to separate themselves from many forms of "The Other." They build fortress neighborhoods and use divisive social policies to insure they are not "contaminated" by those who are different. Let's pose the question "Why is it so difficult to get agreement on important global issues?" If two reasonable people have the same facts about an issue, should they not draw the same conclusions? The answer is "No." When two humans discuss any issue, they are likely to do so through two different - even mutually exclusive - a priori sets of assumptions or beliefs about the nature of reality and the human place in it. For all perceptual, emotional, and behavioral purposes, they live in two different realities. With such species dissociation, different groups are psychologically unable to draw compatible conclusions from the same fact. The worldview is central to individual consciousness, and imposes a personal order on the data perceived by both physical and intuitive senses. Such a mechanism is essential to human functioning. Without this core set of assumptions, the psyche would break up from the centrifugal forces of conflicting perceptions. Because worldview assumptions derive from history and cultural practices, they are mutable through experience or new learning. We can change them through a rational transformation of specific beliefs. Sometimes such transformations can also be stimulated by powerful subjective experiences. In either case the person considers and tests alternatives (based on new inner or external evidence) to his or her ingrained worldview. However, such change is not easy and requires several steps of conscious reevaluation and change. Thus, the citizens of the United States (and most large nations) are deluding themselves by thinking they understand each other. The reality is that they live in widely divergent realities. To the extent groups believe their concept of "god," by whatever name, and their "god's word" (as interpreted by them) is The Truth, they set themselves apart from all others with no less certainty than Babylonians who worshiped Ba'al and Hebrews who worshiped Yahweh 3,000 years ago. No wonder the Muslim Quran, from the third and newest of Western religions after Judaism and Christianity, describes polytheism as a path to Hell.
