Over here, I asked "Have I succumbed to relativism?"
The answer is no. I did, however, succumb to laziness in wrapping up that post. If I had bothered to think some more, I'm sure I could have answered the question at the time.
For a start, I haven't succumbed to relativism because I do not think you should blur the line between something you've postulated for the sake of your mental health and something you believe because you have good evidence for it. I do, always, distinguish between the two and I'm willing to state categorically that, in general, people should make similar distinctions.
On the other hand, I think my statement that postulates for the sake of sanity or comfort should be kept to a minimum might be negotiable to some extent. Postulates for the sake of sanity or comfort are undesirable in that they can end up blurring your perception of the truth. One should not invent them indiscriminately. A reduction in such postulates is a good thing, provided you can survive afterwards. However, there are other good things in life besides the truth. I shall not ask that everyone rate truth as highly as I do. I shall simply ask that everyone rate truth reasonably highly. There is room for difference here. There is not room for an arbitrary amount of difference, that's all.
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I suppose that religious postulates are still pretty important for the sake of sanity... but nobody is going to think in those terms because it won't make any religion look good ("I'm an Orthodox Jew because for the sake of sanity I need people to tell me what to eat").
On the other hand, postulates made for the sake of sanity generally have negative consequences in any case. The exceptions are mostly postulates that are irrelevant to your daily life, whose political analogy is an issue that nobody or hardly anybody cares about.
For example, take "I can really trust that person." If I delude myself and tell myself that about someone who I shouldn't trust, I'll generally get hurt when she breaks my trust. The same applies to "She really loves me," or "I'm going to succeed in this no matter what," or "He's basically a good person."
[P]ostulates made for the sake of sanity generally have negative consequences in any case....For example, take "I can really trust that person." If I delude myself and tell myself that about someone who I shouldn't trust, I'll generally get hurt when she breaks my trust.
I guess one good reason for distingushing between something you believe because you have good evidence and something you believe in order to make life easier is that you can choose when to make decisions based on the latter!
Doing so when the consequences of being wrong are potentially damaging to yourself is a matter of balancing the good done to you by the belief and the risk involved. For example, you might choose to trust that your lover is not cheating on you on grounds that worrying about that sort of thing will stop you from enjoying a potentially beautiful relationship. That amounts to taking a risk in the hope that you will gain thereby. I'm not saying it would always be justified, or that I would make that choice myself, but it's understandable and possibly even reasonable in some circumstances, depending on your personality.
On the other hand, choosing to take action that could hurt someone else based on a postulate-for-the-sake-of-comfort strikes me as morally reprehensible. Stopping homosexual couples from marrying because it comforts you to rationalise your dislike for gay people by saying that what they do is immoral isn't a choice that anyone has a right to make.
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