do religious people really believe?

[Angrboda]

Yes, I read the whole thing. Unfortunately, I lack the time to provide much of an intellectual response. Emotionally, I find condescending the whole endeavor to explain away religion as some maladaption or mental flaw. Most of the other atheists, just rant about that. At least you have provided reasoned support for your opinion that believers are deluded.

I think, before you do, I want to suggest to you that you are putting words in my mouth. I for my part, don't generally think in terms of deluded or not deluded. (Though I am human, so I may at times.) I think it's natural, and political, to cast those whose beliefs radically differ from ours as stupid, deluded, or dishonest. I think at the end of the day, that's more defense mechanism than anything, and I have argued at length that the term "deluded" is irresponsibly used if applied to religious belief. Nor do I, despite my earlier phrasing, view these in a judgmental light. Our reality, the reality we all live, is a bath of emotion and ideas and images that we didn't structure, whose structure has its own internal necessity, and which is molded and developed by social processes that are what make us the particular animals that we are (such as teaching our children what we consider to be the most important life lessons, whether that lesson is to be an independent thinker, or that lesson is to love one's god). All these cognitions are natural, and there is nothing inherently good or bad about any of them. We are born, to use a metaphor I've expanded upon elsewhere, on a river of belief, lazily floating downstream with little actual control over where we are ultimately headed. (Things like where we are born, to what parents, in what economic class, how our minds work [as a species], with what talents and traits we are born — these and other facts, shape our religious journey, the channel of the river, more powerfully than any of the factors which we view as nominally within our control.) This is just the human condition, and I try to avoid placing judgements on any expression of it, though as a human filled with biases and emotions for which "hating and demonizing the other" comes naturally and pays off as a social/political strategy, I'm well prone to having some of those same thoughts myself. I'm not looking for reasons to consider the religious to be defective; I'm simply trying to find powerful and adequate explanations for things in my world that are consistent with what I believe about that world; the same as you do from your perspective, only from different assumptions, beliefs and goals. To me, explanations of religion that have focused on social or political aspects of human behavior, while perhaps having their place, do not sufficiently explain the power and durability of religious belief. Believing in God is fundamentally different from believing in the Democratic party in terms of the experience, and I don't feel those other explanations adequately explain the power of religious cognitions to move and shape us, all on their own. As a materialist, physicalist, and one who accepts the theory of evolution (and finds that it explains a great many things), I simply find the so-called by-product explanation to be both of sufficient power and scope to capture the reality of religion, while at the same time building on simpler parts which we have good, if not conclusive, reasons to believe are sound foundations. You, having different assumptions and beliefs about things, including the nature of God and the mental, are going to find aspects of such explanations unpersuasive, inadequate, incomplete, and even perhaps perniciously prejudicial. I ask that you try not to view it as simply a tool invented to combat religion, and just examine it as nothing more than a scientific hypothesis. Does it account for experience? Is the explanation of sufficient power and scope? (Does it yield understanding and cover all the bits that need covering?) Is it a parsimonious theory? And so on. Not everything has to be framed in terms of a battle between dark and light. Of course, not believing the fate of my soul to be hanging in the balance, perhaps there are explanations for why I take it in such an impartial light which are a product of my own prejudices.