I'm not especially interested in the "uneducated fools"—prod your average Christian, say, and it quickly becomes clear they barely understand the core tenets of

I'm not especially interested in the "uneducated fools"—prod your average Christian, say, and it quickly becomes clear they barely understand the core tenets of their own sect and the sources of their beliefs, let alone even basic apologetics. "Become more knowledgable about the foundations and core beliefs of [faith] than the average adherent" is usually the work of a few days of casual research. Those folks believe because they just don't ever question it at all, which I find kind of dumbfounding seeing as they also profess their belief that it's all of actual no-BS cosmic importance so you'd think they could at least be bothered to read a book or two, but it's not hard to understand why they believe. Their actions are baffling, but not their belief. Then again folks of all sorts believe tons of stuff they don't act on particularly well, so maybe that's all it is. The above about how it's easy to become more knowledgable than the average faithful is true of most stuff people believe, not just religion—but then again, climate change, to pick an example, doesn't claim to have significance to one's eternal soul, so I'd say the stakes of even that are somewhat lower. But anyway, this part's not that interesting to me. It's the ones who have wrestled with the stuff that I have trouble getting in the heads of. Do they all believe? Do even most of them? Surely not in the same way as those covered above—surely their faith is qualitatively different from that—but then, how? Or those who claim to be devout but hold serious secular power—are they really? Even most of them? And again, my trouble is with specific sets of stories and dogmas, not general "I like to think there's a higher power" stuff, which I have an easier time "getting", and in fact it's hard for me to understand that any significant portion of thoughtful religious aren't more or less of that variety and do believe they've joined a mostly or entirely correct religion, miracles and supernatural occurrences and all being actually true. And that's before we throw in cultural and time gaps. What was the faith of the abbot or abbess of a 13th century monastic community like? What was it like in their heads? To what degree did a Pope, considering whether to grant one of these communities recognition, see their duty as political versus carrying out the will and protecting the interests of an almighty deity that became a person (only kind of, sort of, but not really—it's complicated, if you want to avoid heresy) then died, then some fly on the wall might have actually seen the dude's corpse re-animate—imagine the sight!—and some real, actual angels push a stone around, and all that really happened. That's where I get lost, trying to tease out motivations based on faith versus those where the faith's something else—social posturing, maybe.