Sure, but your entire argument that everyone's belief system that isn't yours is a product of deliberate self deception is probably best explained by the fact that you've never had any faith to speak of and are projecting your own thought processes on others.
Is your argument historical? Do you think that all the worlds belief systems have always simply been a process of deliberate self deception? That doesn't really make sense. Where do you draw the boundary between beliefs that are simply wrong, and those that MUST be self deception?
Look, when you (or anybody) tries to tell me that maybe I just don't get "faith" I know that person is putting on the hustle. The nut ain't under none of the cups.
Historically, religious beliefs have retreated from the earliest known cases where the gods were in the sky/sea/darkness/etc as our knowledge has increased. Now our gods hover somewhere just beyond the observable universe, invisible or out of reach or in another dimension, and so on. I believe we have crossed that point where people can claim that their beliefs are rooted. Importantly, the concept of faith explicitly concedes that whenever it's needed to rescue an unsupportable hypothesis. The history of faith reveals the cleverness of the early church lords.
We don't believe that there is a wizard up there, in there, or down there, because there aren't wizards in those places. We can pretend there are, and we do just that. These unrooted concepts are divorced from our experiences and all of the verifiable information available to us. Faith attempts to come to the rescue here, too, where it is more blatantly used as an imaginary bridge. It's both a method of confirmation and the source of its own evidence. Immune to evidence - suspiciously tidy.
The self-deception is found in its abstractness, the virtualization of belief. We suspend our clear and present disbelief, immerse ourselves in faith and/or the spirit or other methods of evoking certain reactions in ourselves (we can even pray a burning into our own hearts), and create our own confirmations. We can seize upon one of the billions of extreme improbabilities we encounter. We can do lots of play-games. However we choose to play, we can then construct a virtual set of facts that we can plainly see are contradicted by reality. And that's of course part of the appeal, as that is something interesting and beyond our experience (it's insidious).
We choose to dwell in these virtual beliefs. The nice thing about them is that we can take off those virtual glasses, or stop running the faith software, and be normal just about anytime we want.
