I'm reading Christopher Hitchens' reflections on his various debates with religious authorities et al, and I think it is very tempting to confuse faithfulness with adherence to doctrine. He says:
Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can't very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he's marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don't truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think.
Hitchens reminds me of the tendency for pedants to believe that everybody who is not has ample time to make philosophical sense of their world and adhere to inconsistencies because of mental lapses, incapacities or worse. And when it comes to religion, secular foes are particularly prone to this sort of error - the assumption that people buy into a coherent slate of beliefs and behaviors. It's a particularly annoying thing to do, especially if one is divorced.
I always recall that there are social implications to Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and that the mind rationalizes so that it doesn't halt. Human behavior isn't provable, especially not by cynics.
