If adhering to a religious belief is supposed to make one a pinnacle of society...why is it then so many religious people find it difficult to actually be nice
The real problem here is not the nature of religious beliefs, but rather the nature of beliefs in general. Put as simply as possible, beliefs are not nearly as efficacious to change behavior as we in the West (especially) have been taught beliefs are.
After all, we in the West have had 2000 years of religion telling us that what we believe has crucially to do with whether we're going to heaven or hell after we croak, and then before religion, we've got Greek philosophy telling us that what we believe determines the quality of our lives.
Shnupper-snock! I say, our beliefs about beliefs are shallow, chunky shnupper-snock!
I say it and I mean it!
But first I need to define the kind of "belief" I'm criticizing here. Beliefs can be divided into two sorts, according to how they are arrived at. Some beliefs are arrived at through purely intellectual means, while others are arrived at through experience. So for instance, you are told as you grow up that "fire is dangerous". You now have an intellectual belief. But then you get curious and touch a hot stove. Ouch! You now have a gut belief.
In order to have an intellectual belief, you must be consciously aware of it. In order to have a gut belief, you need not be consciously aware of it. According to psychologists, most of our beliefs about the world are gut beliefs that we are not even consciously aware of holding.
Gut beliefs tend to be efficacious in changing our behavior. Intellectual beliefs tend not to be nearly as efficacious as gut beliefs and not nearly as efficacious as they are popularly understood to be at changing our behavior.
People who have mystical experiences of oneness sometimes -- but not always -- interpret those experiences of having been experiences of god. The same people often report their experience permanently changed them, made them kinder, more empathetic people -- even years or decades later.
People sometimes have mystical experiences that they do not interpret as experiences of god. Sometimes the same people report their experience permanently changed them, made them kinder, more empathetic.
In both cases, the interpretations -- the intellectual beliefs -- assigned to the experience are of far less importance than the experience itself in shaping behavior.
Now consider this: Cornelia goes to Baptist tent revival one night and upon hearing the preacher shout out his intellectually held ideas about God, heaven, hell, and the good life, Cornelia has what she thinks of as a "Genuinely Profound and Moving Experience". A GPME for short. Cornelia has never had a mystical experience, so she thinks her GPME is truly profound, the deepest experience of her life. She vows to accept Jesus and change her ways, to become a kinder person.
She makes a huge, conscious effort to be nicer to people for two to four weeks. Every day she wakes up chanting "Hey! Hey! Kindness! Kindness! I shall compliment someone's dress today!" But after two to six weeks, she's sick of it (because, as I'm sure you've noticed, consciousness tends to get "sick" of familiar things, it tends to get burnt out by things it has seen or experienced over and over). Cornelia after a mere 2-6 weeks or so is burnt out of making such a huge effort to be kind. She backslides and pulls her sister's hair that day.
And the next day, too! Pulling her sister's hair has actually become fun because it's such a relief from being consciously kind!
That pattern of vow, effort, and backslide is the typical behavioral pattern of people when trying to change themselves via changing their purely intellectual beliefs. A relatively few folks -- a relatively few very, very determined people can make a genuinely sustained go of it, can -- after perhaps years of repeated vows, efforts, and backsliding -- can hold themselves together as a fairly kind human being. But they are the few: Purely intellectual beliefs can be useful in many ways, but they are not so useful as a means of changing our behavior.