do religious people really believe?

[Angrboda]

I've been wanting to address this thread, but my thoughts on the matter have yet to coalesce, so what I have for now is at best partial.

I hope the good Lord will strike me down if I appear to be supporting fr0d0 in any way, but allow me to wax poetical a moment. (Someone spot me on this.) I'd say that faith is the walk, not the destination. Faith is the process, not the result of a process. It is a continual dialectic between trust and doubt. In a sense, love is a similar dialectic in which we continual extend ourselves, risking to trust someone in the absence of any surety that one's faith will be rewarded. (And if I may suggest an aside, regardless of the merits of belief itself, the process of faith and doubt, that dialectic, is ultimately, imo, a character building one. [As a Taoist, virtue based or "character based" ethics are an important component of my beliefs.])

Now, as to the main subject of the thread, I have but pitifully little to offer other than what is at present a largely incompletely formed feeling. Something I've pointed out before is that both theists and non-theist seem to be behaving hypocritically with respect to what they believe, as viewed by the other camp. Atheists as noted here suggest that theist's behavior seems at odds with the plain meaning of their beliefs. Theists on the other hand, look at people who seem to claim that there is no objective meaning or morals in the universe, and wonder why atheists seem to behave, for all intents and purposes, as if there is. I think at bottom, both sides — beyond the potential mischaracterizing of the other — are neglecting that there is a human nature which supersedes and has priority above one's nature as an atheist or a theist, and both miss this more fundamental ground in focusing on the matters of theistic belief. Ultimately, I think belief itself is the wrong lens to look through if you want to understand human behavior. If that's the case, then attempting to paint a person's behavior as primarily a result of their beliefs in this or that sphere is ultimately going to result in an unintelligible image, regardless of how careful you are in the construction.

Anyway, again, this is just a partial and somewhat ill defined stab. Perhaps I'll be able to produce a more coherent statement later; perhaps not.

FWIW. YMMV. IANAL. TINSTAAFL.