I was responding to your statement "Also, a whole bunch of "religious" people of all flavors are socially religious but by any measure of observance or belief are entirely irreligious" with the kind of response that I have gotten in the past from folks in the leftist branches of Christianity (Mostly Presbyterian, as that's what my in-laws are in , but also some folks I know in )when I have this conversation with them. Certainly there are plenty of "bad" practitioners of all faiths, I've gotten drunk with enough Muslims to understand that, but I think dismissing many of them as bearing a "false profession" is inaccurate.
We're still not connecting here. You keep trying to impute some sort of judgmental self-righteousness into my position. I'm not talking about people who fail to live up to what they believe they should or should not do - that describes most adherents to most faiths with any sort of standards of behavior. There's a big difference between a Muslim who believes that drinking alcohol is wrong but succumbs to temptation and a Muslim who doesn't believe drinking alcohol is wrong but pretends to when he's around coreligionists. Or, to take it a step further, a Muslim who doesn't really believe the
Shahada at all, even if he repeats it.
There are a number of people whose professed religion is to a greater or lesser degree disconnected from their actual beliefs. I'm specifically talking about people whose internal beliefs about core issues - say, the existence of a god - are at odds with the belief of the faith they profess. Very few are malicious about it - as might be a priest who insinuates himself into a position where he can abuse children. Most are people whose family historically practiced a faith, maybe who have family that continue to attend at a given congregation, who like their fellow churchgoers, and don't particularly want to leave or lose the support of that ingroup. The draw of a local religious community used to be much stronger than it is today, and so there is less pressure for such people to stay associated with a group, but it is still there. The more closely knit a given congregation is, the more pronounced that pressure might be.
Again, I'm not trying to belittle people like this, simply pointing out that they tend to inflate the numbers of adherents beyond the people who actually believe the doctrine of various faiths.
Yes. Between your deeming a bunch of folks professing faith as "entirely irreligious" and Perd's "Left-wing religion tends to disbelieve [in hell]" I was cautioning against such backhanded dismissal of other's beliefs.
1. My point wasn't backhanding people's beliefs. I was pointing out that there are people who do not really believe what they tell other people they believe. I'm surprised that's even a contentious position. It's not like I'm the first person to notice that not all churchgoers even believe in a god or that there is a difference between claimed preference and revealed preference. It was part of addressing your utterly ridiculous claim that 6% of the US were nonreligious. (I know, "But, but, but, two minutes on Wikipedia said so!")
2. I don't take Perd as dismissing other people's beliefs either. Depending on how you interpret "far left" he might be factually wrong, but what he actually claimed (subject to correction) was: "most people on the far left do not believe in hell". Whether your Presbyterian in-laws qualify as far left or not I don't know. For that matter, I don't have any idea what they personally believe regarding hell - as not all Christians do believe in a literal hell.
This is another snapshot from that old survey from 2014 that comes closer to answering the question. There does appear to be a slight correlation between belief in hell and party affiliation as Perd postulated. It would not surprise me if the party extremes (i.e. "far left") were to have an even tighter correlation.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/belief-in-hell#party-affiliationThat said, from a practical perspective and independent of my apparent inability to clearly communicate to you, you aren't wrong about people reacting to perceived attacks. Even people who don't share belief in a given doctrine might become defensive over that doctrine if they feel that the group they associate with has been attacked.