Are there religious fanatics and/or judgemental religious people because they have a fear of sharing what they really believe about reality and being dismissed as delusional? Are the lies they're telling eating them up to the point of fanaticism?
A lifestyle of willful ignorance and self-deception is a lifestyle of dishonesty. And as Gandhi once said, "Lying is the mother of all violence". And he meant all kinds of violence: physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual.
The problem is that once we accept one lie as a "truth", we have to protect from the actual truth, and means telling ourselves several more lies, to 'shore it up'. And eventually it means we will have to thwart those fellow humans among us who have not accepted our fake "truth" as true, because their very existence threatens to expose it. And so not only do we continue to add lies to our lies, but now we add animosity and rejection of our fellow humans to the course of action we've chose to take in life.
And on and on it goes, until our dishonest lifestyle has driven all but those who agree to bow down to our lies, away. And we find ourselves surrounded by nothing but lies, and liars.