To protect a necessary fantasy

As I lay ruminating in the early morning hours of yesterday, the realization that Gamma was telling me "So there!" wasn't the only thing that came to me. I had a dream in the hour or two that followed. I can remember only two, maybe three things about it.
    Two African-seeming personages were speaking to me (I wasn't "on screen"; they faced my dreaming mind, so to speak). I understood that they were father and son, the father being the primary speaker. He was astonishingly striking (only his head was presented), his face as long as a horse's, the distance from his eyes to the tip of his nose four or five inches and the distance from there to his lips another four inches. A sort of totem pole face. [I am reminded this morning, by Wikipedia, that the totem pole derives from "cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America"—that is, Chief Seattle's people.]
    I wish I could remember the older man's words. At the time of my dreaming I understood that he was telling me there was a religious key of some sort that would unlock the mystery of the "So there!" folks I wrote about on Friday. Glad of this knowledge, I made a mental note to write about Friday afternoon's email interchanges and revisit that day's post. Yesterday I found that writing about the interchanges was enough for one post. But today....

Today I'll try to articulate the beginnings of a "religious" understanding of the "people who don't want the truth," as my old friend the judge characterizes them.
    It seems to me that whatever belief they espouse with their voices raised and their faces red (at once threatening opponents and brooking no debate) is their talisman. A talisman (from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary) is:

An object bearing a sign or character engraved under astrological influences [!] and held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune, something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects

    "The scientists [who say the evidence shows that Cameron Todd Willingham did not murder his children] are 'latter-day supposed experts'" absolves Texas Governor Rick Perry. I did not put an innocent man to death!
    "There is no global warming" averts the potential catastrophe threatening the Earth. We and our descendants are safe!
    "There is no credible evidence of evolution" wards off an unimaginable horror. We aren't the descendants of monkeys!
    "Obama does not meet the constitutional requirements of being a naturally born American" is the magical charm that might avert the evil of our having a "black" president. Obama will be disqualified!
    "The Bible is true" is a talisman with enough magic for all exigencies. Suffering will be rewarded! Evil will be punished! We will not die, but will live forever and ever!

To the people wearing these talismans about their necks, the things to be averted are to them truly evil. Unimaginably, heart-sickeningly so. To be avoided at all costs, not least the cost of the truth:

Governor Perry did put an innocent man to death. "In a clemency plea four days before the execution, Willingham's attorney raised questions about the forensics. Perry has said he examined the information. But he did not delay the execution."
    Human activity is raising global temperatures.
    We evolved from simpler life forms.
    Obama is our legitimate president (and arguably more legitimate than George W. Bush, given the extraordinary fact of his having been appointed by [a 5-4 vote of] the U.S. Supreme Court).
    Suffering often goes unrewarded.
    Evil often goes unpunished.
    We are all going to die, not to awake again.

If, as seems to be, religion is a support system for mutually assuring people's most profound protective fantasies, then a whole variety of lesser sorts of delusionary practices would seem to serve the same purpose. A pertinent project for cultural relativism would be to discover what it is about a particular culture that explains its members need for the culture's distinctive fantasy. In other words, what is it about the people who seem to need to believe, for example, that President Obama is not legit that defines their culture, over against the rest of us, who accept the fact that he is our legal, elected president?