Some “believers” profess belief out of tribal loyalty, yet at their core they are atheists. Others just cling to what’s familiar, or haven’t really thought much about what they actually believe, and why.

But it does seem to be possible for people to claim religious belief while at the same time accepting the findings of science — and not going mad in the process. I suppose it’s also possible that such compartmentalization of the mind may be evolutionarily advantageous.

I think your analogy to theists in general is an apt one. Many religious people do consider their religion to be a core part of their identity, rather than just one more idea they have. Also, in my experience anyway, many religious people are not choosing their religion based on rational evaluation of the evidence. Rational argumentation alone will definitely not be enough to change their minds.

I think Rokeach’s approach could be applied to all religious people by at least metaphorically “putting them in a room” with people of other religious convictions. Then hopefully they see — we all base our religions on these ancient scriptures that some regular dude once said was true. We all have strong emotional feelings that our religion is the one true religion. But we can’t all be right!

He certainly was a great political thinker, but this doesn’t change the fact that people — in a manner of speaking — use his name in vain.

These two references describe the dreadful applied politics promoted by these two outfits.

http://www.logosjournal.com/hammer_kellner.html

http://www.matthewfox.org/sys-tmpl/htmlpage7

Rogers friends also provide loud support for the dreadful outfit described and criticized here:

http://www.soaw.org

The effects of these applied politics are also comprehensively described in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

http://www.dabase.org/p9rightness.htm

Plus related references.

http://www.fearnomorezoo.org/literature/observe_learn.php

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-life.aspx

Orwell is one of my favourite authors, but your fantastic article will now make his books clearer for me.

I’m off to read his books again.

But there is a larger point. If one believes that morality comes from God and that God intervenes in the world, then one must either accept that God does a lot of bad things, or conclude that there is some great plan behind it. But the latter option leads to what amounts to a passive evil, whereby one’s own intellectual laziness leads to thinking little of the suffering of others.

One thing I would like to better understand is why you think conceding the apologistic view, or as you put it “taking God at his word” entails that morality is relative. In one sense, yes: it entails that morality is relative-to-what-God-commands. But that sort of relativity is already inherent in the concept of an omnipotent and intelligent creator. God is conceived as someone who can make the world behave however he wants, and there is no particular reason to expect his wants to match our preconceptions about how the world should be. In other words, relativity-to-what-God-commands is not going to seem like a surprising consequence to a sincere theist — at least not if they are honest. Of course it seems surprising to many of us that it *could* even *possibly* be good to kill someone (e.g. because God says so). But is there anything deeper to this than a surprise? You say at the outset of your post that the theistic view is contradictory, but so far it just strikes me as hard to believe. Is there a literal contradiction in believing that morality is ‘whatever God makes it’ or is it just a really strange view of things?