many people that i have come into contact with who claim to believe in a certain religion either a) have no idea what the religion is about or b) have some knowledge of the religion but exploit it for their personal ends and do not believe in the religion for itself.
here are some examples...
a girl i went to school with treating other people like shit and saying that it doesn't matter, because she has accepted jesus into her heart.
multiple people who buy into a religion with an afterlife because they can't handle the thought that this might be all there is to existence.
those who say they believe in a divine power after being miraculously "saved" from certain death. they do this because like the example above, they cannot deal with the fact that this life may just be a series of accidents, and no overarching plan has been created for individuals or mankind in general.
then there are the lower classes, the oppressed. this is best seen in nietzsche's description of the evolution from the master to slave morality.

i'm sure i could think of other instances where religious belief is insincere, but that would take more effort than i want to put into this. this insincerity is not just relegated to young people, i see this shit in old people as well. and, someone might object, most of my experience has been with christians--particularly southern baptists. so this might be a skewed outlook on it all. but surely the question of insincerity in religious belief crosses over to other religions as well.

so how do you gauge sincere religious belief in other people? how do you gauge your
own? it seems like the only way to know is to be tied to a stake and have a fire lit under you. or to get nailed to a crucifix. we don't have shit like that anymore though. rarely (i'm speaking from an american perspective) are our lives threatened for our beliefs. religion is always a convenience now, never an impediment. for me, this means that insincerity will continue to be bred in our religious institutions.

I do feel a lot of people belief in a religion because they can't handle the idea of an objectively meaningless world which possibly has no afterlife, but then convince themselves they bought into it for some other reason.

A great number of people also believe in their particular faith sects because they were "born" into it.

Let's face it. Everyone on this board would more than likely be a muslim, had we had the misfortune of being born in, say - Iraq.

yes, the insincerity of belief is largelybdemonstrated by people who are born into a particular system...but i feel like this is perpetuated by a society that does not hold us accountable for beliefs. because religious beliefs are mostly based on faith, this makes it ever more easy for the believers to never search the nature of their beliefs, and so it is easily co-opted by the selfish ego in a project of validating its own existence and its complacency in the political-economic-social system in which the person resides.

i am a drunk motherfucker with nothing meaningful to say.

I take it you might want to use better passwords, huh

I can't stand people who turn to faith because they see the universe and it's existence as otherwise pointless. It's completely the fucking opposite. COMPLETELY the opposite.

hah. actually, no one hacked my account to post that message. i actually posted immediately after the other one. i think its important to remind myself that i am full of shit, just like everyone else.