Obviously it is somethign you would not have said openly in former times, however, you could tacitly know it and act in this knowledge. Similarly, said statements are essential to the public image such churches project, but do you need to take it any more seriously than the corporate "mission statement" pages where everybody knows they are just PR and in practice their sole mission is to make money?

A fake can only exist if there is a reality for it to be a fake of. Gold exists and is valued, and so there is also fake gold. But mithril is a fictional metal, so there is no fake mithril, only pretend mithril. "God" only works as persuasion when people generally believe in God. "Let's pretend" may work for some groups of neopaganists, but I can't see society running on it.

Burke repudiated atheism and its close companion deism, which were well underway by 1792. He was not attached to Christianity in particular, but only because he believed some other religions to also have possession of divinely revealed truth. (I'm cribbing all this from here, btw.) Is his consistency in expressing these views to be taken as evidence that he believed the opposite?

And what Jiro said about typical mind fallacy.