Delusion
| Tell me about your mother |
| Let us examine... |
| Random examples |
| —Robert M. Pirsig |
A delusion is an aggressively-held belief that is demonstrably false. It is commonly (but not exclusively) the result of a mental condition, such as schizophrenia.
The noted New Atheist, Richard Dawkins, wrote a book entitled The God Delusion, in which he asserted that the question of God's existence was tied to the question of special creation, and then argued that since special creation has largely been demonstrated to be false, belief in God is a delusion.
Sometimes a correct belief may be mistaken for a delusion, such as when the belief in question is not demonstrably false but is nevertheless considered beyond the realm of possibility. A specific variant of this is when a person is fed lies in an attempt to convince them that they are delusional, a process called "gaslighting," after the 1938 play Gaslight, the plot of which centered around the process.