nameandnature

Finally, there's an arrogant-Dawkins-atheist tendency to dismiss anyone who does have any sort of religious belief as stupid.

I don't think all religious people are stupid (after all, I used to be one :-) With regard to a sympathetic account, there's a body of psychological/anthropological research from people like Boyer which looks at religion as a natural phenomenon which arises out of cognitive tendencies in humans. This isn't the old "fear of death/social glue" stuff so much as why specific sorts of belief arise. Dan Dennett also wrote a book about it, but it's a bit longwinded as he spends most of it telling his religious readers not to stop reading and yet can't quite mask the fact he thinks they're silly: you can explain Dennett's central insight in a short essay. People like Andrew Brown over at the Graun like to castigate Dawkins for ignoring Boyer's stuff (that blog post of Brown's gets fun when Dennett and Dawkins turn up in the comments). Brown quotes Boyer:

“In the description of modes of thought and modalities of belief, we find a mistake that is in fact general to anthro­pological descriptions of religious representations. The mistake consists in describing such ideas from an epistemic rather than a cognitive view­point. Describing a set of ideas from an epistemic viewpoint consists in viewing them as an attempt to say something about the world, as constituting some form of knowledge (however vague, inconsistent, or actually false) of the world. For instance, the Fang representations de­scribed above in some detail can be said to constitute a certain view of the supernatural world, which aims to account for otherwise inexplicable occurrences. In contrast, describing a set of representations from a cognitive viewpoint consists in showing what processes lead people to entertain the thoughts they actually entertain. The question of whether they constitute a system, represent the world, explain it, and so on is irrelevant in a cognitive study. Religious representations are almost invariably described in epistemic terms in anthropology. They are ex­plained as abstract intellectual systems, not as mental representations actually entertained by human subjects.”

Nevertheless, I think the Brown/Boyer approach is problematic when many proponents of religion will tell you that they're talking about a system which represents the world. It's possible that this "many" means "evangelicals I argue with, like robhu", and I'm falling into one of the traps that Brown thinks Dawkins falls into. That is, Dawkins's failing (in the eyes of "more sophisticated" atheists or agnostics) appears to be taking religious people at their word, but it's hard to do otherwise without patronising them. To say "The larger point is that almost everything people say about their religious beliefs should be understood as coming from Lorraine Kelly and not from Decca Aikenhead" as Brown does is also, in fact, saying that religious people are... well, if not stupid, at least irrational in the sense that I want to use rationality; although as Brown says, that's because most people are irrational, including atheists.