Here’s something Andrew Sullivan posted earlier this month. I thought I was going to write something of substance about it, but the more I can think about it, the more I can only go “huh?” Sullivan seems to assume that religious belief should never be treated as as real as beliefs about other parts of reality. When a person says something like that, I wonder if they understand what it is to really believe a religious doctrine. Hume: “Hear the verbal protestations of all men: nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: you will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.”
What’s weird is that I’m not completely confident I would have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out. The vast majority of who we think of as “reasonable people” would I think read that and find it good and praiseworthy.
My usual mental habit to catch that kind of thing going on is to substitute a real belief about the world – say, the reality of anthropogenic global warming. In this example it would clearly be nuts to propose that our discourse on the subject must seem reasonable and accessible to denialists: that’s basically wholly incompatible with actually acting on the problem.