The problem with religious “belief” is twofold.
First, if you teach, usually young children, to BELIEVE one untrue nonsense, then you have equipped them to be credulous of anything.
Second, we are use to “religious” people living within the constraints of modern secular societies that were necessary to end centuries of religious violence. Intolerance is a feature of all mythological belief systems because, if you sincerely believe that there is “evil” and your doctrine stands against that evil, if you are certain that heresy is a threat, if you think that people who do not conform or agree or fall in line are the “other,” then essentially being at war with all those others is inevitable.
We should not be surprised, as we watch fundamentalist Christians in the US, having been given consent to throw off all external constraint, a la “Heart of Darkness,” have reproduced a hideously medieval atmosphere of religious persecution. That tendency to violence is a feature, not a bug. We just got used to several decades of most deeply beliefy religious folk being restrained by secularism.
