The Pew research poll has me thinking about how religious people incorporate religion in their life.

Forgive me if this doesn’t make much sense, I don’t have Harris’ gift of clarity.

I know about evolution as a rough idea.  I don’t know the specifics, but I know the overall idea.  I understand that if I use a germ killer or antibacterial that is only 99% effective, rgw surviving 1 means that eventually, I’m going to have a problem with highly resistant germs.  I get the gist of evolution, and there are small places where I can use this knowledge in my day-to-day life without a need for knowing all the details.

Atheists know the bible very well.  But we know it as a list of isolated details.  We see the things in the bible on their own, in the open, and see the impossibilities and contradictions.

Religious people seem to treat these facts very differently.  Religious people are part of a tribe that has a body of shared values.  These values supposedly build upon passages in the bible, but the passages themselves are not important, it’s the social ties that matter.  It’s the meaning brought to the passages.

To use an idea of Dan Dennett’s, what they really have is a believe in belief.  Since they are brought up within this group, the foundations of those beliefs are never challenged or critically considered; belief is just ‘the default setting’; it’s what feels natural to them. 

When we present facts about evolution, they continue to miss the point. They don’t see the greater story that emerges from these facts.

Similarly, they can have a fairly poor factual knowledge of the bible, yet they still feel that we are missing the point of faith, or missing out on the greater story that they get from cherry picking the right facts from the bible.

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How about we do both?

The confrontationalists provide moral support to atheists, and shift the grounds of the debate. The accommodationists can then play good cop and occupy what is now “middle ground”. Do both.

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“Religious people seem to treat these facts very differently…  ...what they really have is a believe in belief…. the foundations of those beliefs are never challenged or critically considered”.

Your observation is correct. A big part of the problem when trying to reason with theists is that rational arguments simply bounce off their ears like drops of water from swan’s back.

The reasons for this can be found in neuroscience. It has been demonstrated that theists switch off their critical thinking when it comes to religion. The critical, thinking parts of the brain are simply switched off. This appears to be a defence mechanism, as it also has been shown that the main psychological benefit of religion for theists is the reduction of ambiguity and associated anxiety. Conversely, feelings of anxiety and ambiguity drive people to seek comfort in absolutist dogma, however absurd and immoral these may be.

Studies also show that religious zeal is driven by feelings on insecurity and uncertainty. The more insecure and uncertain the individual, e.g., with regards to his or her sexual orientation, the greater the zeal with which such an individual would condemn ‘sexual perversion against ‘god’‘.

The literature on the psychology of religion is extensive, so I only include one pointer to an interesting recent study on this issue, published in the Proceedings of the US Academy of Sciences:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full

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It was interesting but not surprising to learn atheists know more about religion than the average believer.  Most of us were raised in one or another religion but found it unpalatable. /we budding atheists were the seven-year-olds who kept asking why in Sunday school, the twenty-year-olds who went on a search for a something better.  That search naturally required learning about different religions, reading the books, asking questions. We educated ourselves about the religion we were leaving and the alternatives on offer. If we hadn’t felt uncomfortable with what we were expected to believe, we wouldn’t have looked past the rote.

That may be why we atheists particularly resent someone else thinking we need to be “saved”. We have done our homework, thank you very much. We have made an informed choice. So, back off! 
seen94

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Ive always been bugged when a believer asks where i get my morals.  There are many ways.  Animals have morals.  lions will share their food with other lions, dogs will protect eachother from danger, and even clean eachothers wounds.  We get our morals from society.  If my family raised me to be racist, i would probably be racist for no reason, but i was raised to respect people of all races.  This moral was not just in our society from the begining of man because as we all know history is full of bigotry, which is usually spouted from holy books.  People say we get our morals from the bible, well excluding all the demented morals in the bible, what about morals that our society has that arent in the bible.  The bible does not say anything about beating animals, but we dont beat animals.  It doesnt say why it is ok to eat cows and chickens but not whale or cats, but most of us eat cows, but not cats. (its because as a society, and has humans we developed are own morals.

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