Beliefs vs. facts

Cultural Cognition Project
Is it real or just a belief?

And perhaps even more important, at what point does belief become a self supporting dependency? Such as an addiction that prevents the addicted from seeing how to break a bad addiction.

Of course there is the mental effect on the physical body to consider as well, for better or worse. How does your beliefs effect your life, your interaction with father physics, mother nature and your abstract level of interaction with others and the physical effect that has, etc.?