Is it even proper to use the verb "to believe" as an indicator of adherence to religion?
I have recently written an answer elsewhere for a question about why some people insist on attempting to declare atheism a "religion".
Sometimes writing such a reply enables me to put things together. This time, I realized that far as I am concerned it is just weird to expect someone to "believe" in a deity, let alone in a presumed religion.
Christianity and, above all, Islaam do. Which is why they actually have words ("Infidel" and "Kafir") that hold the twin meanings of "liar" and "unbeliever".
Those are very disparate meanings, but within the scope of their doctrines they end up meeting and perhaps fusing.
Christianity and Islaam expect people to believe in the validity and "truth" (in the sense of correspondence to the reality of facts) of their respective doctrines, barring impediments of lack of awareness or mental or moral failure to grasp those doctrines.
Frankly, that expectation does not speak well of either doctrine. Not in the slightest. Their continued reliance on such an unreasonable expectation may well have doomed both, even. At the very least, it strongly compromises their very ability to function as (presumed) religions.
If nothing else, they are certainly unique in their relationships with their god-concepts. Generally speaking, deities tend to be abstractions or idealizations. Not so with YHWH and/or Allah, who is presumably fit for an entirely different treatment, perhaps even as the backer of a supremely exalted bet that is nonetheless presented as being somehow religious in nature.
That is a very exotic proposal for the relationship between a religious doctrine and its own deities. And I fear that as time went by, the efforts of many to attain dialog with those doctrines with a penchant for raising armies with a desire to take arms "for God" may have taught the wrong lessons elsewhere. In seeking common ground for a mutual understanding, some measure of cultural contamination may have occurred, spreading some of the self-inflicted confusion about the nature and role of deities from the Abrahamics to other groups.
That is very unfortunate.
The way I see it, it makes literally no sense to purport to believe in a deity. One either has use for a deity, or one does not. And when we use a deity, there is no question of whether we believe in it. Any concept that we use is real for the purposes of that use, even if it is self-contradictory or insane. Deities are no exception, nor do we have any reason to want them to be an exception.
Yet it would appear that, for many Christians and most Muslims, religion should be mostly about proclaiming the belief in the truth of their God. That is a wasteful and often harmful goal, which at best keeps them occupied when they could better use their energies for religious pursuits proper.
Because religion is not really about belief, except perhaps by a very cynical and heavily politized view. Belief is something that happens, but does not deserve to be nurtured. Religion at its best is not about belief, but rather about values, goals, and the means of nurturing and expressing them.
