What's your opinion on Liberal Religion?

[Belacqua]

Basically as long as someone has some sort of belief in God (or whatever is at the centre of the religion in question), alongside belief in your second sense/behaviour, whatever the ratio is between them in terms of perceived importance, then I have no issues with that.

Yes, I think that's right. 

Anyone who thinks of himself as Christian, at any point in history, will think that something about Christianity is true. He assents to the proposition that Christian tenets are true. 

And at any time and place, there will be some balance between people who think carefully about the tenets and people who are less interested in that kind of thing. For the former type, assent to proposition weighs heavily, but for the latter, ritual and lifestyle are most important, and the details of theology are for other people to worry about. 

So for example heretics, and the people who want to punish them, place great importance on assent-to-proposition belief. The whole fight about homoousion vs. homoiousian is purely about propositions, since nothing about it would require a change in ritual or ethics. Or there's Isaac Newton, who believed the Arian heresy but knew enough to keep it quiet to save himself grief. 

I guess what I'm arguing is just that most Christians aren't Isaac Newton. They accept the general truth of things but don't worry too much about theological issues. And I suspect that the more Christianity is dominant in a culture, the less people worry about it. If it's the medium in which we all swim, then we are more likely to accept it without sweating the details. 

I think that this is still largely true. As with the Buddhists I mentioned in my city, how they live it is still more important than what the tenets are. People who would definitely want a Buddhist funeral might very well have no idea what's in the Lotus Sutra. Whatever those words are that the priest is chanting, they are for the priest to know, and me to nod along to. If pressed, they might even say that reincarnation is silly, though they still want the funeral service. 

(My wife is a total atheist, but still says a prayer for her late father at our home Buddhist altar every night.)

In our own time, when science is considered the royal road to truth even among most Christians, the ratio of understanding vs. just accepting is probably about the same. The percentage of people in the airplane who can explain how airplanes work is probably quite small.

People like us, who debate on Internet forums  -- for fun -- which propositions we should grant assent to are the oddballs.