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Are you religious? If so, could you give any examples of why you think these things are true?
Because the median religious person certainly doesn't act as if their faith is true. People still get sad when their relatives die and are still scared of death themselves, even though they (supposedly) believe in heaven. They claim that God answers prayers but then don't ask for anything that couldn't happen in a Godless world (e.g. God ends all war and cures all disease tomorrow) because it might ruin the spell when it doesn't happen. Even the Pope himself suddenly turns into an agnostic on the topic of hell in spite of Catholic doctrine.
The model of religion as 'belief in belief' is much more consistent with what we see.
Here we go again. We are required to believe that Hell exists. We are not required to believe that any one person is there, because only God knows for sure. Yep, that includes the worst monster in history you've ever heard of. Likelihood they're in Hell? Very damn high. Pronouncement of absolute certainty they're there? Nope, can't do it.
Let's go back to the 14th century, Hollander translation of Canto XIII, 'Paradiso', "The Divine Comedy" where Dante puts these words into the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas:
130 'Let the people, then, not be too certain
131 in their judgments, like those that harvest in their minds
132 corn still in the field before it ripens.
133 'For I have seen the briar first look dry and thorny
134 right through all the winter's cold,
135 then later wear the bloom of roses at its tip,
136 'and once I saw a ship, which had sailed straight
137 and swift upon the sea through all its voyage,
138 sinking at the end as it made its way to port.
139 'Let not Dame Bertha and Master Martin,
140 when they see one steal and another offer alms,
141 think that they behold them with God's wisdom,
142 for the first may still rise up, the other fall.'
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As a sidebar: you have misunderstood what Pope Francis said in the link you provided. He did not turn into an agnostic, nor go against Catholic doctrine. The Catholic church does not definitely say that anyone is in hell, nor does it prohibit the hope that all might be saved. What is prohibited is teaching that all will be saved. It is possible, but we do not know that it will be so, and the doctrine is that we must be open to the possibility that some might be in hell even as we hope for that to not be the case.
Don't you find it a little odd that an organisation that is extremely sure about the existence of God, creation, the resurrection and about how the church is the only source for salvation suddenly starts admitting its own fallability on a topic that might offend modern audiences? I doubt the medieval church was so unsure about something so profoundly fundamental. It smells an awful lot like Mormons getting sudden revalations that e.g. polygamy is no longer okay or that African Americans are now allowed in the priesthood.
I'd also add a thought that comes to me when I read theological discussions, it's all just words, words, words. If hell was real in the same way that the earth's molten core is real, people would look for evidence, run tests and experiments, apply lessons learned from similar fields. There would be a real answer. Instead we get an understanding of existence that is based purely on written and spoken words, and people can come to basically any conclusion they want.
Newsflash: it ain't. Same way running consecrated wine through a mass spectrometer won't show you that this has turned into blood.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that materialists think everything has to be a stone they can kick or it doesn't exist.
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That doesn't even make sense as an argument. The Catholic Church is quite willing to hold firm on things that offend modern audiences a great deal more than hell. People aren't really that offended by hell, but they certainly are offended by the idea that no, gay people cannot legitimately marry, and no, a man cannot become a woman or vice versa, both of which the church stands firm on. Then there's the doctrine that women can't be priests, or the ban on contraception, which also offend modern audiences, though not nearly to the extent as the first two. Say what you will about the Catholic Church, but it isn't afraid to say "no, this is true" even if it's unpopular to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, exactly. What do you want people to do here? The spiritual is not, as a rule, something we can explore empirically via physical measurements. Nobody denies this. It sounds like you're saying "people don't do experiments to prove hell is real, so that proves they don't believe in hell", but that's silly. If that's not what you mean, then I don't follow you at all.
Pre-modern Christians absolutely did believe that hell was literally beneath the earth and that heaven was literally in the sky. As scientific understanding has advanced, Christianity (and other religions) have reduced their claims to make them unfalsifiable. It's not that the spiritual cannot be explored by physical measurements. It's that the results of those investigations were negative, so religions retreated to the motte of unmeasurability.
Of course, religous people still talk about stuff that physically happened as evidence of the divine (e.g. you meeting your wife), but experiments that actually test things like prayer and find them wanting get explained away, typically by saying that you can't test God (as if a normal prayer asking for stuff isn't doing exactly that).
Have you been there? Most people believe in things like Antarctica or Australia while never even having been there.
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I am, and I will. But first...
You are completely failing to understand people when you say stuff like this. People get sad when a relative dies because it hurts to not have them around now, even if you believe you'll see them again someday. People absolutely pray for an end to war and disease, it happens all the time. I personally pray for God to end wars at least once a week. You really, really do not understand the mindset of religious people based on what you've said here, and I strongly advise you to not draw inferences based on the very faulty premises you have laid out, because they will be completely invalid. Anyways, that aside...
I believe that the existence of a supernatural universe (not a specific deity) is pretty obvious based on simple logic. If we trace back the chain of events in our universe, at some point we must arrive at the thing that kicked it into motion - the uncaused cause, the prime mover, pick your term. There are two possible explanations for that: either the universe itself is eternal, having always existed, or else it was set in motion by something outside the universe which was eternal and has always existed. It seems obvious to me that the natural world itself cannot be supernatural, that would be ridiculous. Therefore, there must be a supernatural force which was the uncaused cause behind the chain of events that is our universe. Which is to say, it is obvious to me that we live in a supernatural universe. That is a limited insight - it doesn't tell us anything about what this supernatural force is like - but it does seem very clear to me that our reality is not materialistic.
I also believe in the existence of the Christian God not through logic, but through the personal experiences of a person whom I know very well. He's not lying, he's not hallucinating, the only possible explanation is that the things he experienced must have truly happened. I won't bother to relate them in detail because I know that "someone I know had supernatural experiences" isn't at all convincing. It wouldn't have convinced me if it wasn't someone I knew personally. But suffice it to say, I do believe it, though I think we have left the realm of the "I think it's obvious that..." behind.
I also believe that God intervenes in the world. Not always in the way we want him to, and not in ways that are undeniably divine intervention, but I do believe that it happens. I believe that I met my wife through such an occurrence. The circumstances in which we met were sufficiently improbable that I do not believe they could have occurred by random coincidence. Moreover, my wife has said that at the time she was praying to meet the man God intended for her, so I believe that our meeting was in answer to her prayer. Again, I don't think that this is something which would necessarily be obvious to anyone, but it seems very clear to me that this was the work of God in our lives.
All of which is to say: yes, intelligent people who are religious do in fact believe that God exists, that he answers prayers, and that he intervenes in the world. It isn't just compartmentalization and going along with the culture in which one grew up.
And God ignores your prayers, and the prayers of the billions of other Christians who have also prayed for this obviously good thing for centuries. Can you see how, to an outside observer, this might make it seem like you're not actually asking as if someone is listening? God looks down on, say, the mass murder of Christians by ISIS as part of his benevolent plan and doesn't intervene. But apparently he does intervene to help you meet your wife?
Would I be right to think that the latter came before the former? Because from my experience and reading, people turn to religion for emotional reasons, and then the apologetics come after to see off the logical doubts.
My model of it leans less on people going along with what they were raised in (although the statistics show that conversions are basically a rounding error, religions grow through the cradle), and more through motivated reasoning. That's what I mean by compartmentalisation. Applying wildly different standards to God that to the ones you apply to everyday life. I don't think any religious person believes in God in the same way that they believe that things fall down when you drop them or that the sun rises in the morning. But motivated reasoning, applying different standards to religious beliefs than normal beliefs, and positive mood affiliation leads to 'belief in belief'.
Not at all. Certainly, I can understand if you say "this makes it seem like there's no God". You wouldn't be the first, nor the last. But I can't see any good argument to be made that unanswered prayers (or at the very least not answered in the way we might want) somehow reflect on my own sincerity.
You would in fact be incorrect. The former preceded the latter by something like half a decade.
Again, your model is gravely mistaken. You would do well to abandon it and start fresh.
I have genuinely tried. I've read dozens of Christian blogs, about prayer specifically. I know it doesn't work, but the fact that some people do forms a mental itch I can't seem to scratch. What I've found is that there are a bunch of different excuses. One is that 'God isn't a vending machine that gives you what you want', which surely cannot apply to benevolent intercessory prayer. Another is that 'prayer is about building a relationship with God', as if one-directional begging is how relationships work. Another is that prayer is about 'understanding God's will', which suggests you shouldn't be asking for anything at all, because God's will is perfect and predetermined. Another is 'God answers prayers with yes, no or not now' which of course covers literally every possible outcome regardless of what it is.
This is not a model of the world, these are arguments as soldiers, pulled out defensively to explain the unexplainable on an ad-hoc basis. You see the same thing when it comes to the problem of evil or the problem of hiddenness. I would love to see a consistent, logical model of God that corresponds to the actual world. Of course, if you do that, what you get is Deism, which is just atheism while doing spooky hand gestures.
So I'm forced to come to the conclusion that the word 'belief' should not be applied to religion and to observations of the real world. Whatever it is religious people are doing, they don't believe in God in the same way that I believe in the existence of the sun.
Pretty clearly not, since you can see the sun and do engineering off its presence.
What's your understanding of traditional marriage vows?
"to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part"
Does such a vow make sense to you?
Would you take such a vow, and if you did, would you really mean it?
Would you agree that such a vow is best modelled as a bet, which resolves only on death? But what is the point of a bet that you can only "win" when you die?
What I'm trying to gesture at here is that there exists a class of decisions which humans make based on incomplete information, and about which one might uncharitably claim they are resistant to evidence-based assessment, but which nonetheless are meaningful and at least plausibly positive-sum. Belief in God, and prayer and other elements that go along with it, appear to me to be a member of this class.
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You can pray for a community of young people full of children (and a future) and God will lead you to the correct Church.
Or you can pray to the AI god and perhaps be rewarded with riches and the unparalleled thrill of pinning the weasel.
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